Lakota East Spark 2012-13 Issue 3

Indepth: Club sports

A.L.I.C.E. Training

Spark Dec. 17, 2012

Indepth: Hookah

Injuries: ACL

www.lakotaeastspark.com

and where they are taking the video game industry

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 1

2 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

Spark

Website Contents

Stay updated on East news, check athletic results, read music, movie and book reviews all on Spark’s website.

www.lakotaeastspark.com

This month

12/15

Born with a Gun

12/17

Review: The Hobbit

12/15

East Blood Drive

12/4

Girls Basketball

11/30

Homemade Chapstick

11/29

Four Frappuccinos

11/26

Lauren Mazzella depicts the American issue of gun control.

Dillon Mitchell reviews the first film of the trilogy adaptation of The Hobbit.

106 East students donated more than 100 pints of blood for the community.

East girls’ basketball loses close match against Carroll High School.

A how-to guide on making chapstick for the dry winter season.

11/26

11/17

Halley Davidson reviews frappuccinos from around the West Chester area.

Five Full Body Workouts 11/26 Rianna Reese presents five full-body workouts one can do to stay fit.

Breaking Dawn Pt.2

11/23

Ashley Evans was named East’s first All-American volleyball player.

11/10

11/02

Staff Playlist: Josh Shi 11/21

Read about and listen to eight songs Josh Shi thinks everyone should listen.

Haynes GMC Coach

11/20

East football head coach Rick Haynes was named GMC Coach of the Year.

Ashley Evans, Volleyball 11/17 Ashley Evans was named East’s first All-American volleyball player.

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Spark Contents Volume XXI Issue CXLVII

On the Cover art and design jeff back jack dombrowski irfan ibrahim Spark looks at the changing faces of the video game industry, and how those faces will move into a new generation of games.

This Issue

66

12 Play 60

The Cincinnati Bengals visited Woodland to donate to the school.

14 Teacher Plan Bell

East teachers express concerns about the new plan bell and its effects.

26 Indepth: Using Hookah

East seniors discuss why they use hookah as doctors explain the risks.

30 Photoshoot: Faux or Fur

East senior Sam Wheeler is vying for people to stray away from real fur.

34 Special Report: Cancer

Spark continues cancer coverage with a story on East teacher Wally Vickers.

30

56

37 Package: Video Games

The world of video games is changing due to new audiences and developers.

56 Red Dawn Review

Spark compares the remake of Red Dawn with the 1984 original film.

58 Feature: Joey Huff

Even though Joey has cerebral palsy, he inspires the East basketball team.

12

58

60 Indepth: Culture of Sports

Sports have changed because of clubs, college recruiting and new rules.

66 Gymnastics

East junior Michelle Peters switched from club to school gymnastics.

78 Head to Head

Spark staffers go head to head on the issue of gun control in America.

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opinion | letter to the editor

“Support the fellow Hawks” Every Friday night, thousands of people packed the stands to watch the Thunderhawks play football under the lights. People chanted, cheered and yelled so loud that the fans from the opposing school could hear. Our student section was filled rain or shine, so tightly packed that it was difficult to move. My question is: why didn’t fans come to the volleyball games?

Going into the state tournament as a team that had a decent shot at winning the state title, it was difficult to get pumped up for a game when an entire side of the bleachers was empty.

You would think that students would show up to the volleyball games, considering our 21-2 record. People still continued to show up to the football games, even though the team’s record was 6-3 at the time. I agree that our football team was good, and I still continued to be one

Website Commentary www.lakotaeastspark.com

Spark Online

Top Stories from Aug. 1 - Dec. 2

of those rowdy fans in the student section, but I wish that some of those students would have cheered for the Hawks indoors as well.

Volleyball is an indoor sport. Games don’t get cancelled if there’s lightning, so you’ll never have to clear the stands halfway through a game.

Standing in the student section at a volleyball game, you are about four feet away from the players on the court, unlike football, where you cannot make out who the players are with their helmets on. With only ten payers, six on the court at a time, you will most likely know all the players’ names. At most, volleyball games take about an hour and a half, compared to a threehour football game. And don’t worry, football fans, volleyball games are during the week so you’ll never have to miss a football game!

On two occasions, we did have a strong student section. When we played our biggest rivals, Lakota West and state champions Mount Notre Dame, we did have a huge student section. All I ask for the future is that those fans return to the games and support their fellow Hawks.

-Carlie Haddad, East senior

“Proud to be a part of Lakota” I am a senior at Lakota East and I recently read the article about how Lakota Local schools have maintained their level of excellence over this past year, even with all of the budget cuts that we have received due to the failed levy. This has showed that our teachers have continued to work hard and help us further our education even though they have lost resources, had pay cuts and many other things that have impacted the school. I am very proud that I am a part of the Lakota school district and that we can still achieve at such a high level.

However, it does worry me that with the possibility of more budget cuts occurring

Are you planning on getting a Wii U? Yes - 12%

1) Jeff Back’s “Never Forget, (Seriously)” - 1,570 page views 2) Marissa Alsip’s “Student Feature: Mallory Webb” - 1,019 page views 3) Raika Casey’s “Political Parties or Teams?” - 276 page views 4) Maggie Schaller’s “Turn Off Honey Boo Boo” - 254 page views

6 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

I have not heard about the Wii U - 48%

No - 40%

over the next few years that our rating could possibly drop from excellent. We have a great environment at our school and it is a wonderful school to go to, but I feel that some parents will no longer want to send their kids to Lakota due to the drop in excellence. That is unfortunate because we all know what an amazing place it is to be in.

-Jake Chestnut, East senior

“ACT shouldn’t be required” I never thought being a senior could be so stressful. We have to apply to colleges, figure out what we want to major in, find a way to pay for school, and hardest of all, we have to take the SAT or ACT tests. Having to take the SAT and ACT tests is the most stressful result of them all. Some people are very smart, but may not be good test takers, like me. I get really nervous and stressed out during big tests.

These types of tests may cause people to get bad scores, which allows their dreams to get destroyed. Not having the score that’s needed to enter the college of your dreams can decide your future, and I feel that a test shouldn’t determine where you can and cannot go. How do they expect us to remember everything that we have learned throughout the years, all on one big test?

The test isn’t only long, boring and full of frustration, but it’s also not fair to those who are smarter than what a test can determine.

Everybody has been taught things very differently than everyone else. We may have been taught differently or by a different teacher.

I don’t think it’s fair to take a big test like the ACT or SAT and I think that it shouldn’t be required to go to the college of your hopes and dreams.

-Jasmine Wilson, East senior

GOT SOMETHING

TO SAY?

The Spark, which provides an open forum for students, faculty, subscribers, and community members, encourages letters to the editor. Letters can be sent to the publication at the address on the following page, dropped off in the journalism classroom (room 118), comments on our online stories and tweets/comments to our social media accounts below. Letters must be signed and the staff reserves the right to edit letters for length, grammar, invasion of privacy, obscenity or potential libel. The opinion editors will contact letter writers for confirmation. email | letters@lakotaeastspark.com

opinion | letter from the editor

Spark

2012-13 Staff

c/o Lakota East High School 6840 Lakota Lane Liberty Township, OH 45044 Phone: (513) 759-8615 ext. 15118 Email: admin@lakotaeastspark.com

Editor-in-Chief Jeff Back Editor-in-Chief Sophia Li Editor-in-Chief Natasha Rausch Business Manager Graphics Manager Photo Manager Associate Photo Manager Webmaster Writing Coach News Managing Editor Lifestyle Managing Editor Package Managing Editor Entertainment Managing Editor Sports Managing Editor Opinion Managing Editor Art Managing Editor Public Relations Director Public Relations Director Technology Director Survey Coordinator Copy Director Copy Director

Hannah Lee Irfan Ibrahim Ellen Fleetwood Michael Tedesco Emily Chao Jasmine Tuazon Mohinee Mukherjee Kaitlin Lange Zach Fulciniti Dillon Mitchell John Grasty Nugeen Aftab Jack Dombrowski Amber Jagpal Maddie McGarvey Arvind Madhavan Sam Hauck Onur Eroglu Katie Masterson

News Editor News Editor News Editor Lifestyle Editor Lifestyle Editor Lifestyle Editor Package Editor Package Editor Package Editor Package Editor Entertainment Editor Entertainment Editor Entertainment Editor Sports Editor Sports Editor Sports Editor Opinion Editor

Lauren Fang Daphne Ocran Shervani Patel Marissa Alsip Halley Davidson Rachel Hartwick Morgan Bain Alexa Chryssovergis Angela Ferguson Claire Schomaker Chris Bowling Hannah Eads Josh Shi Sydney Aten Kyle Culp Claire Middleton Meeta Bhardwaj

News Art Editor News Photo Editor Package Photo Editor Sports Photo Editor

Rahul Mukherjee Renée Noe Kenzie Walters Nick Kanaly

Business/PR Associate Business/PR Associate Business/PR Associate Business/PR Associate Technology Associate

Madyson Alexander Jack Mangold Molly Myers Mansi Patel Dan Turner

Advisor Dean Hume Spark is a publication that is produced at Lakota East High School.

The magazine is completely student-generated through the efforts of the Journalism I, Journalism II and Journalism III-Honors classes. The publication material may not always reflect the views of the Lakota Local School District or the publication as a whole. Content is controlled and edited by the staff editors. The staff will publish only legally protected speech adhering to the legal definitions of libel, obscenity and invasions of privacy.

The publication is produced every five weeks on recycled paper. Production costs are covered through advertising, subscription sales and fundraisers.

The purpose of Spark is to inform the students, faculty, and community members of news, information and issues that may influence or affect them.

Natasha

Rausch From the Editor

If I was to claim myself a master at any one thing, it would probably be “The Adventures of Tom and Jerry” game on the Gameboy Color.

The first level is easy for any newcomer. Jerry has to catch a few pieces of cheese and he’s on his way to victory. But each level increases in intensity and complexity. Eventually Jerry must jump from window sills to rooftops; he must use the couches to propel himself to higher levels in the house, and sometimes even collect silver stars for more lives.

Level 10 is where it gets really difficult—besides avoiding Tom behind every corner, I have to direct Jerry to avoid the ever ominous snapping sunflower pots.

Every family trip to Montana, Texas and Virginia was filled with hours of running Jerry around the different courses on my Gameboy Color while listening to my CD player. But by the time I reached junior high, I wanted to continue improving my dubious video game talent. So I used all of my birthday money to buy the latest and greatest—the Nintendo Wii. I now consider myself a master at Mario Party 8 and Wii tennis. My “Mii” is ranked as a professional.

Wii has also given me some interesting family memories, like when my brother and dad competed in the “Just Dance 2” game to “Toxic” by Britney Spears. If only I could have gotten a video of them mimicking Britney’s signature bend and snap.

My mom, sister and I would be in the background laughing hysterically as the game ranked their dance moves as “missed” and “almost.” My brother and dad claimed that the Wii sensor just

wasn’t catching their moves fast enough. They were just mad they couldn’t beat my high score.

Clearly, I was a born gamer, so I even tried playing “NBA2K13” on my brother’s Xbox 360.

I wasn’t accustomed to using any other buttons besides the “A” and the D-Pad, so all the triggers and bumpers were Greek to me.

In the end I resorted to clicking as many buttons as possible at once and hoping that Rajon Rondo would still be able to make the basket. Eventually, I had to stop choosing the Celtics as my team; I felt bad for making my favorite players lose all the time.

And eventually I stopped playing in general because even Michael Jordan couldn’t improve my skills in hours of basic training camps.

My mastery at the Tom and Jerry game hadn’t prepared me for my “NBA2K13” fail. Maybe my video gaming skills weren’t as keen as I thought. And maybe videogames are no longer made for just the typical game-obsessed males.

Maybe anyone can find their own Tom and Jerry game to master.

This issue of Spark addresses the new world of video games.

In the past, games were generally geared toward the hard-core male gamer. Now, the audience has changed genders to attract girls to the game as well as casual gamers.

Console sales have also been steadily decreasing since 2008 because people are starting to invest more in phone games like Angry Birds instead of actual handhelds like the PS Vita, and the video game developers are running out of new ideas. So who knows, maybe a new Tom and Jerry game will be coming out again in the future. SM

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news | online

Scan this QR Code to continue reading the stories below and other stories online at lakotaeastspark.com

FEATURE: East German teacher Robert Ogan

INTERalliance Is Training Future Professionals

East senior Hannah Hall picks out fabric for Project Linus.

story rahul mukherjee photo michael tedesco

story lauren fang photo ellen fleetwood

Robert Ogan is a maverick.

He has traveled to Peru to visit the Amazon, to France to study abroad and to Poland to teach at the French Embassy.

Ogan’s knowledge of languages is vast. He knows Spanish, French, German and Polish by heart, and he is still teaching himself Russian, Dutch, Swedish, Turkish and Portuguese. With this resume, many would strive to become international translators. But Ogan is different.

In 2012, he applied to become the teacher of East’s German program, which is in the process of being phased-out because of last year’s district-wide budget cuts. [continued...]

story claire schomaker | photo ellen fleetwood

With 80 students attending the first meeting, East INTERalliance, a chapter of an organization created to connect high school students with local area businesses, is attracting potential members with the different opportunities it is offering.

“The goal of INTERalliance is to connect high school students with local area businesses so that students can make a connection early and hopefully stay in Cincinnati,” East computer science teacher and INTERalliance sponsor David McKain said. “A lot of talented students are either graduating or leaving the area, even though in the I-75 corridor we have... [continued...]

East german teacher Robert Ogan is the new teacher for East main and freshman campus.

Student Organized Service (S.O.S.) emerged in September after East students attended a student service workshop, where they learned about different service opportunities for students at other high schools.

When forming the club, S.O.S. advisor Todd Hartman, who is also the jazz band director for both East and Lakota West high school, intended that a president, vice president and a board would lead the club meetings. The Board consisted of East seniors Julia Higgins, Caitlin Graska, Alex Fuhr, Ian Blomquist, Kaitlin Lange and Hannah Hall. Higgins is president and Graska is vice president.

Graska did not attend the service workshop. However, after speaking with Higgins, she quickly became very interested.

“Julia asked if I wanted [continued...]

INTERalliance exectuive director explaines professionalism to Interalliance Club members.

Students Launch New Service Club

Board Discusses “Innovative Learning” Plan story lauren fang

The Lakota Local School District Board of Education held a special session on Nov. 29 to discuss innovate learning ideas and share information from the Ohio School Boards Association (OSBA) Capital Conference, which all Board members attended.

Superintendent Karen Mantia updated the Board on new career-enhancing opportunities

8 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

by presenting a flow chart of the various business type classes they planned on “revamping” at the secondary level.

“We’re going to discuss a different opportunity at every one of the board meetings, so that you can logistically see some of the exciting work we are doing and how can we make our coursework career ready for kids,

so that they will be globally competent, well rounded and advanced in skill,” Mantia said.

“This will be a demonstration of our thinking.”

Mantia said that nothing is decided yet and high school principals and staff will be involved in the decision making process. Once the new business model is finalized, the changes will “culminate into action planning.” [continued...]

news | school

EAST STUDENTS VICTIMS OF CAR VANDALISM A male East freshman was recently arrested in connection with the damage of more than a dozen cars in the East north parking lot.

East junior Kerry Iles had the F-word etched into her car. The suspect, who is a male East freshman, allegedly vandalized at least 12 vehicles at East.

B

utler County Sheriff ’s Department arrested a male East freshman on Nov. 15 in connection with a recent string of vehicle vandalism incidents on the north side of the main campus parking lot.

The fifteen-year-old was arrested and charged with Criminal Damaging/ Endangering, according to police reports filed by the Butler County Sheriff ’s Department.

“The student faces seven misdemeanor counts of criminal damage,” school resource officer Deputy Doug Hale said.

According to Butler County chief probation officer Devin Goodman, a minor charged with a criminal damage misdemeanor can be held in detention for 90 days, have to pay restitution for any damages and/or be put on probation.

During the freshman’s alleged three-week vandalism spree, between 12 and 13 vehicles were defaced, Hale said. Most of the victims had one or more of their tires slashed while other students had expletives etched onto the sides of their cars. Hale said that law enforcement identified and spoke with the people visible in the security footage until it caught the suspect, who told Hale that he committed the crime.

The vandalism incident that took place over three weeks has brought into question the amount and level of security in the East parking lot. Two types of cameras are currently located in the parking lot including Pelco Stationary and Pelco Spectra Dome cameras purchased from the Cincinnati Alarm company, according to Lakota Local School District chief operations

story madison shelton infographic riley boeddeker, wingchung chow photos ellen fleetwood

officer Christopher Passarge.

“We have both stationary cameras and cameras that have the functionality to pan and zoom,” Passarge said. “Each camera is located to cover specific areas of the facility.”

Although some cameras in the parking lot have the ability to zoom, many of the cameras are stationary and focused at a particular angle, allowing only a certain area to be seen, according to Hale.

Butler County law enforcement has faced issues in the past with the orientation of the security cameras. About three years ago, a group of two or three people were stealing catalytic converters from Toyota cars at various locations in the Butler, Warren and Hamilton area, Hale said. Two vehicles in the East parking lot were affected by these attacks.

The cameras captured the vehicles pulling onto school grounds, but then law enforcement lost the image of the perpetrators because the

The 15-Year-Old male allegedly Defaced between 12 to 13 vehicles over the course of three weeks.

Most students’ cars had one or more tires slashed.

Other Cars were keyed with expletives.

views of the cameras were restrictive. “[With our current security cameras] whatever you have focused in, that’s all you see,” Hale said. “I’d like to have [more of] the kind that pan and go back and forth instead of just being stationary, but with budget cuts, there’s only so much that can be done.”

Despite the issues caused by limited camera views, Lakota director of building and grounds Robert Fisher said that stationary cameras are the best option for parking lot security. Not only is the clarity of stationary cameras better, but it is also because the film on these cameras can be recorded and reviewed easier, Fisher said.

“A camera that would pan, tilt or zoom would have to be able to stop and catch any issues in the parking lot,” Fisher said. “This requires someone to monitor the camera system.”

After junior Kerry Iles reported an incident of keying on Nov. 13, the administration continued to investigate. According to East principal Suzanna Davis, there were not any assumptions made by the administration or law enforcement about the possible targets of the vandal.

“As we got further into the investigation and we came up with additional information, it became clear to us that [the vandal] was not targeting any individual student or group of students,” Davis said. “It was more about the location in the parking lot it was occurring.

Because of where the marching band students

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news | school park in the marching band practice area that just happened to be where the vandalism occurred.”

As the investigation continued, so did the defacing of the students’ vehicles. According to an incident report filed by East senior Ronnie Russo on Nov. 14, he and four other East seniors including Ian Knight, Katie Gooch, Lauren Mazzella and Jacob Stegeman had their back right tires slashed. All of the students were parked on the north side of the lot between spot numbers 1115 and 1126.

Gooch recalled hearing the squeal of her tire deflating when she arrived at her car, which she drives to school every day.

“My stepdad wasn’t too concerned [about the tire slashing], because he figured the school was pretty apt to find out who it was,” Gooch said. “We got a used tire [for my mom’s car] which only cost $30, but I know some people had to pay like $200.”

One of those people was Russo. His tires were slashed twice: on Nov. 1, with all four tires slashed, and then on Nov. 14, with just the back right tire slashed. This totaled about $500 in damage according to Russo.

“I filed two separate police reports,” Russo said. “The second time I went to the office first. [The administration] was very upset that

Surveillance

the situation was still going on.”

During the investigation, the administration assured students affected by the vandalism that it would look through the surveillance footage, but it was only able to give out limited information, according to Iles. “[Law enforcement] is doing everything it can, but sometimes we just can’t explain to students and parents everything we are doing during an investigation,” Hale said. “We don’t want to tune the suspect in on what we are doing.”

Although law enforcement could only release certain details, some students felt the administration should have told students and parents more about the vehicle vandalism earlier.

“I think [the administration] should have made their efforts known,” Mazzella said. “[If] someone would have said they heard someone talking about [the vandalism], then maybe more people would have come forward with information.”

Gooch agreed with Mazzella and believed the administration should have informed the students of the tire slashing, so they could decide if they wanted to drive to school or not.

Davis sent out an email the day the student was arrested and explained the situation to the

Spectra® IV SL This camera is used by Lakota East High School to monitor outside activities.

In 2007, The Lakota Local School District bought new security requiment for East. Spark takes a look at one of their cameras.

Jazz band

Concert band

choir room

Gym

= Area vandalized 540 TV Day and Night 768 X 494 Image Sensor 0.65 lux at 1/60 sec (color) 0.15 lux at 1/60 sec (B-W) 4CIF, CIF / 25 or 30 fps at 4CIF maximum, scalable

Spectra Features

Built-in Surge and Limited Lightning Protection, Aluminum Construction 54° at 3.6 mm wide zoom; 2.5° at 82.8 mm telephoto zoom

10 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

infomation Chris Passarge

This camera has a f/1.6 (focal length, 3.6 ~ 82.8 mm) lens. with 23X optical zoom.

East community. According to Davis, the email said “everything the administration needed to say.” “[The email] made people aware of the incident, that we had in fact identified a suspect and the Butler County Sheriff ’s Department had made an arrest,” Davis said. “[The administration] will be moving forward with appropriate school discipline action.” SM

sideNote: HOW TO FILE A POLICE REPORT sidebar courtney yanzsa When East junior Kerry Iles discovered the F-word keyed into her car, she was confused about what legal action to take.

“How to handle a keying is not something they tell you how to do in driving school,” Iles said. “I didn’t know if I needed to make a police report, so I asked my friends and went to the office. I felt kind of silly having to report a crime at school.”

According to Tom’s Superior Driving School instructor Tina Hauser, the first step in filing an incident is to call the police, because the police report always needs to be filed after an accident or incidence of vandalism.

“If you are at East, you find [resource officer] Deputy Doug Hale, and he’ll come and [file] an accident report,” Hauser said.

Police reports are necessary not only for keeping track of the facts of an accident, but also because they help determine the insurance coverage of the person’s damaged property. “[For] a lot of people, their insurance won’t cover [many] things unless there is a police report done,” Hale said.

Because officers are bombarded with police reports daily, however, reports are prioritized based on the severity of the situation.

“If I’m going to take a report where someone’s tire is flattened, and [the dispatcher] gets a call of a house that’s being broken into, then they disregard us on the report for the tire, and they have us go to the [house],” Hale said. “We always [attend to] the [most severe incident] first.”

If an accident or an incident of vandalism occurs at school when the sheriff is not present, the student should contact the sheriff ’s department at East.

In case of an incident of vandalism after school hours, the student should contact the local police department. SM

Z

news || school school news

onta CLUB

East forms a womens’ empowerment club to unite its female student body.

story and infographic daphne ocran photo kaitlin owens

S

triving to advance the status of women and strengthen relationships in the female community, the East Z Club was formed to bring the message of Zonta International to female students.

According to the group, its message is centered around the idea of shared unity and respect among women, as well as the empowerment of young females in the entire Butler County community.

East counselor Jill Kelechi is the club’s adult supervisor and was inspired to form the club by a friend who told her about the organization’s mission. According to Kelechi, East’s Z Club’s main focus will be around its yearlong service project, an awareness video which strives to improve communication among female students. The project will connect Zonta’s overall mission statement directly to the school’s specific audience.

“Some may call it anti-bullying, but it’s not all about bullying,” Kelechi said. “Girls need to learn how to communicate with each other in a more effective way, one that is less hurtful and more supportive. [Their message is] that everybody has struggles and difficulties. It’s about encouraging people to find out about others before they assume or judge.”

East junior Danielle Lewis and sophomore Sarah King serve as the club’s president and vice president, respectively. Alongside the 23 members of the group, both girls plan to

Kellsa Mbah and Katie Dunaway attend a meeting of East’s Z Club, which aims to strengthen the female community.

spread the club’s message outside of the high school to younger students in the community.

“We’re going to have a live assembly around February or March where we’re going to talk with all the girls at East,” Lewis said. “We’re also going to go to talk to junior high kids and try to stop [the bullying] early, before it becomes an issue.”

East students -- 66 percent of the 312 surveyed -- approved the formation of the Z Club, and East principal Suzanna Davis is supportive. “[The Z Club] is absolutely in line with what we are looking for in terms of offering those types of opportunities particularly for our young women,” Davis said. “As females, we need to begin to look at what’s meaningful and get exposure.”

Although the group was only recently formed at East, Zonta has an extensive history.

Zonta International itself was founded in 1919 and is a global organization that works to advance the status of women through the use of service projects and public advocacy. The organization currently has clubs in each major continent.

East’s Z Club is sponsored by the Zonta

Where Do Women Work?

Club of Cincinnati, an organization that currently has 49 members and is growing every month. Terri Purtee-Stein, who has been president of the club since 2006, became involved with Zonta for both personal and professional reasons.

“My stepsister was married to an abusive man and had a horrible time getting out of the marriage,” said Purtee-Stein, who has been actively involved in the Zonta Club of Cincinnati since volunteering for a club fundraiser in 2006.

“Zonta’s mission is to advance the status of woman. Service projects raising awareness about violence against women is one of our goals at both the the local and international levels.”

The East Z Club hoped that the awareness video will make a positive impact on the school’s female students and change the entire mindset of the building. “[The club] is something that I am really passionate about.” Lewis said. “It is not just about girls bullying each other on Facebook or Twitter. We are trying to have a domino effect.

If we touch one girl’s heart, then it is going to make another girl say, ‘Oh, we should not [bully others.]’” SM

Where Do Men Work?

Women make up 92 percent of registered nurses

Men make up 87.3 percent of construction workers

Women hold 96.8 percent of all secretarial jobs Men hold 60 percent of all media and telecommunications jobs Women make up 81.9 percent of elementary and middle school teachers

Men make up 77 percent of transport and warehouse workers

information npr.com, bls.gov, catalyst.org

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 11

news| community | community news

news | community

Left: A student excitedly talks with her aid after getting to ask the Bengals a question at the assembly.

Bottom from left: (1) Bengals players Michael Johnson, Terence Newman and Domata Peko speak at Woodland Elementary.

(2) An East helmet signed by the Bengals players (3) A girl shouts “Who Dey!” at the presentation (4) Nate Clements, Bengals cornerback

the Bengals say let ‘em play The Cincinnati Bengals recently visited Woodland Elementary School to give a $10,000 grant to help rebuild and replace Woodland’s 22-year-old playground. story emily haynes | photos ellen fleetwood | infographic cameron drake

W

ho dey! Who dey! Who dey!”

The chants of every Woodland Elementary student reverberated off the gym walls, plastered with orange and black signs proclaiming the school’s love for the Cincinnati Bengals.

But their excitement had nothing to do with the Bengals’ recent win or their playoff contention. Woodland Elementary was excited because it was one out of 34 schools in the nation and the only school in the Lakota Local School District selected to receive a $10,000 grant through the Play 60 program from its local National Football League (NFL) team,

12 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

which is the Bengals in Greater Cincinnati.

According to the NFL’s Play 60 mission statement, the goal is to form the next generation to be the healthiest and most active it can be, which is why the grant will be put towards the construction of a new playground at the elementary school.

Woodland principal Valerie Montgomery, one of the 2,200 principals who applied for the grant in September, is thrilled that her students will be able to play on a renovated facility.

“Our playground is 22 years old,” said Montgomery, who has been principal at Woodland for two years. “It’s not safe for the

students or the community that use it daily.”

To complete the application, Montgomery had to answer three questions regarding the school’s NFL team pride, their physical education environment and how they stress the importance of eating healthy. NFL representative Bill Strunk said Woodland was chosen out of more than 30 schools in the area through a process of several judging panels.

The decision involved members of the Bengals office and the NFL as a whole.

Three consecutive levy failures contributed toward the need to build a new playground. A recent round of budget cuts that slashed $1.5

news | community

An Apple a day 472

The Play 60 campaign emphasizes a balanced diet as well as a recommended 60 minutes of activity daily.

654

= Number of Calories Burned in 60 Minutes for 130 lbs. = Number of Calories Burned in 60 Minutes for 180 lbs.

Dairy 2-3 Servings 899

649 Poultry 2-3 Servings

409 472

654 er v i ngs

-11 S

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i

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infomation foodpyramid.gov, nutristrategy.com

million from the elementary level budget also reduced class time for physical education. Each student now has gym 12 times a year, which translates into about 9.5 hours total per year, compared to the 36 classes the students had during the 2011-12 school year.

“I think it’s really sad,” Woodland fourth grader Kennedy Holder said. “Gym was my favorite special and now recess is the only time I can play.”

Bengals running back BenJarvus GreenEllis has a similar view on the reductions.

“When you take out physical education, kids won’t learn the social skills [that they would learn outside the classroom],” Green-Ellis told Spark. “It’s good for them to go out there and burn some energy.”

Green-Ellis, along with teammates Nate Clements, Michael Johnson, Terrance Newman, Leon Hall, Andrew Whitworth and Domata Peko, presented the $10,000 check, answered questions from the students and participated in a circuit workout with 50 children. Johnson, an outside linebacker, believed in the importance of the Play 60 program’s mission statement.

“We need to teach kids how to exercise and take care of themselves at an early age so it becomes a habit,” Johnson said. “They can carry on that healthy lifestyle into adulthood.”

Not only is the playground used by Woodland students, but it is also used by Liberty Junior School students and families who live in the neighboring communities, such as Lakota Pointe and Dutchland Woods.

Woodland parent and Lakota Pointe resident Shantelle Oyako visits Woodland’s playground every other day with her two children, Hannah and Ethan, the latter of whom had learned how to ride a bike there.

“I’m very excited for the new playground because this set is so worn-down, ” Oyako said. “One concern I’ve always had is the gravel surface. It’s very dangerous.”

Gravel, however, is not the only safety concern of the old playground. The hooks that hold swings in place need to be checked and

Our playground is 22 years old. It’s not safe for the students or the community that use it daily. replaced frequently to prevent the swings from falling off completely.

Second grade teacher and mother of Kennedy, Jennifer Holder is often nervous when her daughter plays on the tire swings.

“Those tire swings are just so old and nervewracking,” Jennifer said. “They creak and sway, and as a parent, you just want your child to play somewhere safe.”

Maintaining the playground to fit the safety

regulations standards has been a priority for Montgomery and volunteers in the community.

She has been very aware of these concerns, which is why a new rubber surface will be added in place of the gravel, along with a swingset fixture. Those two components make up Phase 1 of the new playground. Although the Bengals have donated $10,000 to the project, the Woodland Parent-Teacher Organization (PTO) still needs an additional $11,894.11 and, according to Montgomery, the district has agreed to provide some of the funds.

The second stage, Phase 2, would potentially add more swings and a climbing structure and would cost another $26,000.

To gather enough money for a safer play area, both Montgomery and the PTO’s playground project coordinator Dana Zucker have planned many fundraising activities to first buy the equipment and then the $7,000 charge to install it. The seven Bengals players even signed a East football helmet donated by head coach Rick Haynes that will be auctioned off at a later date.

Montgomery and Zucker are hopeful that they will have enough money to start installing Phase 1 this summer. Meanwhile, the buzz created by the seven football players who set foot in the elementary school has not yet died down, and Montgomery does not expect it to for a while.

“This is just very exciting for our community,” she said. “I can’t wait until we can see our work paid off.” SM

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 13

news | school

LEFT: Students must stay in the gym or cafeteria until they are allowed to go to their lockers at 7:50 a.m.; CENTER: Students congregate on Main Street as 7:50 a.m. draws near; RIGHT: East art teacher Linda Augutis tries to utilize her plan period in her vacant room.

CURRENT PLAN PERIOD: EAST’S BIGGEST FRUSTRATION

East teachers’ current planning period from 7:15 to 7:50 a.m. has caused troubles for administrators, teachers and students alike. Because of the budget situation, however, change to the schedule is unlikely. story angela ferguson | photos ellen fleetwood | infographic alice li

E

ast English teacher Rich Schmaltz is used to being alone at school for hours every weekend. Sundays are when he gets as much grading done as he possibly can, from the time when he arrives at a single-digit hour of the morning to about 4 p.m. when he leaves.

When he has to, he uses Saturdays as prep days: making handouts, running off copies and planning for the next week.

The additional amount of planning time that Schmaltz spends outside of the work week used to be much less, but now he works 8 to 10 hours on weekends. He used to be of the few teachers who would come in outside of the regular school week but this year, he has noticed that more teachers have made working at school part of their weekend routines.

This trend, a result of the Lakota Local School District’s $10.9 million budget cuts last year, is related to the implementation of this year’s new teacher planning period.

This consists of a school-wide planning time

14 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

beginning at 7:15 a.m. every day before students arrive. Ohio state law requires the planning period to be 10 percent, or 42 minutes, of the teacher workday at East and Lakota West high school, but East’s teacher planning time is 5 percent less than the average teacher planning time provided at nearby public school districts Fairfield (45), Hamilton (50), Princeton (45), and Oak Hills (49).

According to Schmaltz, although teachers last year managed seven class periods a day, they had roughly 60 to 70 minutes of daily student-free time. On the other hand, this year’s schedule with the morning planning bell means that teachers are instructing six periods each day and supervising a 25-minute extra help with a 30-minute break for lunch.

After the Lakota Board of Education asked district administrators to make cuts, the Board settled on superintendent Karen Mantia’s proposal to adjust the planning period because of two major advantages, the foremost of

which being financial.

“If you gave one-sixth of the teachers one period off, you’d have to hire one-sixth more teachers to make sure that kids have teachers at all times,” Board president Ben Dibble said.

“The clear advantage [of the new planning period] is that it makes our school system more efficient.”

The shared planning period was also intended to allow teachers direct time to communicate with colleagues.

“To have one period off a day to collaborate and plan makes no sense if the people you need to collaborate and plan with are not planning that period too,” Dibble said. “We have phenomenal teachers, but if they all share their strengths, we will end up with even better teachers.”

Based on teacher feedback, however, Schmaltz said that teacher-to-teacher communication is actually occurring less now.

During their planning time, teachers are so

news | school focused on what they have to do for their good as he would like it to be. He has always own classes that they do not have time to changed his lesson plan every year, but this collaborate with other teachers. Furthermore, year, he cannot because of the lack of time.

92 percent of 25 East teachers surveyed rated “I am pretty much doing what I did last their productivity during the new plan bell as year because I do not feel there is time in the less than it was last year. schedule for me to innovate any [new lesson Budget cuts mean change for students, plans],” Severns said. “I feel like I have not too. Last year, East senior Lea Buckenmyer grown as a teacher from last year.” came to school every day at 6:45 a.m. to check Although some teachers do not see her Honors Physics homework. She said it the current planning period as the best helped her on tests, but now as an Advanced arrangement, Dibble said it serves its purpose.

Placement (AP) Physics student, she does not “[Teachers] live their job,” said Dibble, who have the opportunity to receive extra help in believes that the 42-minute planning period is the morning because she is forced to wait in an additional opportunity for teachers to plan either the gymnasium or cafeteria until 7:50 at school. “Is [the current planning period] the a.m., when students can report to class. best? We honestly did not have time to figure “I do not feel as confident about physics,” out ‘best.’ Given the circumstances and our said Buckenmyer, who is also tutoring two finances, it is pretty darn close.”

Honors Physics students because they, too, are opposed to trying to bring the whole class East Principal Suzanna Davis has held two not able to get help from East science teacher along, I am running around putting band-aids teacher listening sessions in order to allow Sandee Coats-Haan in the morning. “Coats- on things.” teachers to voice their opinions about the Haan still posts [homework] answers online, Like other East teachers, Schmaltz said he changes this year’s budget reductions have but it is easier to talk about the key with her if can teach six periods a day with half an hour of brought to the school. Davis said that these I do not understand something.” planning time. All he needs to do is hand out sessions helped the administration understand Coats-Haan is concerned about her students worksheets all day. how the budget cut-induced changes in the as well.

“It is killing [teachers] emotionally because school are playing out. “[My AP students] are used to demanding they are having to say, ‘I have to do less than “I certainly want to hear about things that attention from me,” Coats-Haan said, “but the what I feel is good teaching,’” Schmaltz said. are going well and areas that we may need honors kids say, ‘Oh, I don’t get it. I guess I Severns also feels that his teaching is not as to continue to look at,” said Davis, who was just will not.’ Where I would have out on maternity leave for much been able to reach out to them in of the new planning period’s the past and pull them in, I am actual implementation. “[But by] not [able to] do that [with this having these listening sessions, schedule].” [we will] not necessarily be able to She is not the only one: 88 turn around and solve all of the percent of 26 East teachers problems.” surveyed think students’ learning One thing that the is being “negatively impacted” by administration cannot change is the new plan period. In addition the current plan period. Davis said to the implications the planning the current schedule will remain period has for this year, though, that way for the rest of the school Coats-Haan is also concerned year, unless something were to about the further effects it will change at the central office level. have on next year’s students. “[Administrators] are doing “I am worried for what we what they can,” Schmaltz said. “As are setting for the future, for rough as this is, it is sort of weird AP,” Coats-Haan said. “These that this is the most [connected [AP students] have the best work teachers] have been with the ethic and I have done everything administration.”

Lakota Princeton Hamilton Oak Hills I can to support that, but I am For now, Severns said he 42 Minutes 45 Minutes 50 Minutes 49 Minutes not doing anything to build and would like to see more creativity in support work ethic in the class of teacher-administration discussions 2014.” so that schedule changes for East science teacher John the 2013-14 school year can be Severns has heard that there made this February and March. has been a drop in student Meanwhile, Schmaltz is looking performance “over and over for something a bit different. again” from teachers.

“What are [teachers] hoping “The only time I have to work for?” said Schmaltz. “Salvation. It with [students] is during class, is good to know that people who so it feels like sometimes I am work here are professionals and just running from one student do whatever they have to do and to the next,” said Severns, who whatever they can do, [but it does is vice president of the Lakota not] always line up, so it ends up Education Association. “As being whatever we can do.” SM

150 OUT OF 328 SURVEYED EAST STUDENTS HAVE TRIED AND FAILED TO GET HELP FROM A TEACHER BEFORE SCHOOL BECAUSE OF THE NEW PLAN BELL.

Comparing High School Teacher Planning Period Lengths

infomation princeton schools, hamilton city schools, oak hills schools

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 15

news | school

East French teacher Bridgette Cornette stands guard next to the barricade.

Ready

FOR

ACTION

East students and staff receive additional training to react in the case of a hostile intrusion in the school.

story alyssa roehm infographic rahul mukherjee photo renee noe

I

n order to prepare students to respond to an armed intruder entering the school, East went through a more intense version of Alert-Lockdown-Inform-Counter-Evacuate (A.L.i.C.E.) training the week of Nov. 26.

Assemblies were held Wednesday, Nov. 28 and Thursday, Nov. 29 to explain the new procedure to be followed during an intrusion.

Two surprise A.L.i.C.E. drills were executed on Friday, Nov. 30.

After the first drill, which took place during the beginning of third period, Lakota Local School District athletic director Richard Bryant announced that 98 percent of the building was safe from the shooter. The second drill happened near the end of fifth period. Students that were in the halls during the drills were pulled into nearby classrooms, hid in bathrooms or stood near exits, which represented that their best option was to run outside.

Students were not the only ones who received A.L.i.C.E. training. All teachers in the building had their A.L.i.C.E. training on their professional development day on Nov. 5th.

The training was similar to the presentation the students had with more focus on scenarios and how to direct students.

East math teacher Stephen Orlando searched ways to barricade a door on the internet, and he came across a security bar, which had a u-shaped hook that held the handle of the door and a rod that extended to a rubber pad, which attached to the ground.

The night before the drills took place at school, Orlando went to the store to buy a bar for his classroom. He showed his classes how the bar prevented the door from opening. Curiousity, Orlando cited, led him to purchase the bar.

16 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

“[The administration] asked us to take it seriously and try to figure our how to barricade our door” Orlando said, “so I looked at it like a problem to be solved.”

A.L.i.C.E. was created by SWAT officer Greg Cane in 2000 following the Columbine school shooting.

“I asked my wife, who was an elementary school principal, how [her school] prepared for a shooter,” Cane said. “She told me about their Code Red Lockdown procedure. When I asked her about how they trained to respond if securing in place is not available or does not apply, she said they had received no information along those lines.”

After doing research, and not finding any programs that provided “proactive response strategies and advice,” Cane and his wife created the A.L.i.C.E. program.

My emphasis this time is you cannot be any easy target, whether that’s running away or putting a barrier between you and the shooter.

Lakota started using A.L.i.C.E four years ago. Bryant, who had his first A.L.i.C.E. training seven years ago, conducted each of the assemblies on Wednesday and Thursday. This past summer, he went through the highest form of training a school official can receive with a rigorous five day, eight-hours-a-day training program. During this time, he went through excessive drills in which he had to jump out of

windows to escape a fake gunman. “[The training] scared me,” Bryant said. “[The students at] East were informed of what to do [previously], but I don’t think the information that the kids had put them in a position to respond appropriately. We decided to increase the training [and make it] a little bit more intense and then make the drills a little bit more intense.”

Bryant said that schools are required to have fire drills once a month and A.L.i.C.E. training once a year. There has not been a death from a school fire in 60 years while deaths from school shootings happen around every two years.

According to Reuters.com, there have been 11 major U.S. school and university violent attacks, from the bombings in Bath Township, Mich. on May 18, 1927 to the shootings in Chardon, Ohio on Feb. 27, 2012.

“We only do [safety drills] once a year because that’s what the law dictates,” Bryant said. “It seems like common sense, but we have people that are not comfortable with us doing the drills that we do in the building. In the future we would very much like to do one a quarter at least two times a year.”

East Principal Suzanna Davis believed A.L.i.C.E. drills are important to make sure students know what to do in case a gunman is ever in the school.

“Safety and security is a number one priority as a school, and it is always good to practice your response to different things,” Davis said.

“We felt that it was critically important to walk through some actual situations and have some people rather than just talking about it actually putting in some action.”

Bryant also included more points in this year’s presentation to make sure students were

news | school as prepared as possible. perspective,” Garcia “My emphasis this “Bryant told us 14 out of 28 East said. time is you cannot about what he went be any easy target, teachers surveyed feel through in training whether that’s running it was really that they are somewhat and away or putting a intense.” barrier between you East sophomore prepared in the event and the shooter,” Taylor Longworth that an armed intruder thought it would be Bryant said. “We cannot have kids just beneficial to have enters the building. freeze and not act. You more A.L.i.C.E. drills have to do something during the year in case ,[so that you are not an easy target].” there was ever a shooter in the building.

East senior Lizmarie Garcia thought this “It is good to see how kids perform under year’s A.L.i.C.E. training presentation was pressure,” Longworth said. “[With more drills, more informative and helpful than it was in the A.L.i.C.E. procedure] would become more years past. common. If something did happen, it would “I feel like this one was put into more be more natural to react.” SM

Major School Shootings Since 1998 Despite the fact that the chance of East students being involved in a school shooting are less than being struck by lightning, incidents still occur.

Dekalb, IL, Feb. 14, 2008 - A former graduate student killed five students before killing himself.

Blackburg, VA, April 16, 2007 - A student killed 32 students and faculty.

Red Lake Indian Reservation, MN, Mar. 21, 2005 - A 16-yearold high school student killed nine people and wounded several others. He then killed himself.

Chardon, OH, Feb. 27, 2012 - A student opened fire in a cafeteria killing three students and injuring two others.

Tuscon, AZ, October 29, 2002 - A failing student shot and killed three professors and then himself. information reuters.com

Littleton, CO, April 20, 1999 - Two students killed 13 and wounded more than 20 others before killing themselves.

Jonesboro, AK March 24, 1998 - Two boys, ages 11 and 13, killed four girls, one teacher, and wounded 11 others.

Nickel Mines, PN, Oct. 2, 2006 - A dairy truck driver killed five girls, and then himself.

Huntsville, AL Feb. 12, 2010 - A professor opened fire and killed three colleagues and wounded three others.

UPDATE:

QUARTER EXAM SCHEDULE CHANGES story claire middleton

A

dministrators from both East and Lakota West high school have decided to return to a quarter exam schedule similar to the three-day one that was in place during the 2011-12 school year.

The exams will now be taken over the course of two days from 8:05 a.m. to 12:30 p.m each day. The first day will consist of first, second and third period exams, and fourth, fifth and sixth period’s exams on the second. Students will have 80 minutes to take each exam, and at the end of each day, students will receive an early release. From 12:30 p.m. to 2:40 p.m., make-up assessments will take place.

According to East principal Suzanna Davis, the goal of the original change to first quarter’s exam schedule was to minimize the amount of disruption in the classroom. The administrators saw an increase in student’s instructional time using the new schedule, but also recognized that with these changes came “unintended consequences.”

“This eliminated the concern that students had about studying twice for exams spread out over the course of two weeks.” Davis said. “Our goal was to try and get [the schedule] as compacted as possible in terms of time so that they could study once for that assessment. It will be a little more in line with what we have seen in the past.”

According to a survey sent out to 324 students at East, 92 percent of the students preferred last year’s block exam schedule. Davis, however, insisted that there has not really been an “old schedule,” saying that over the past three to four years, there has been a different schedule each time.

Evans, who was part of the 92 percent of students that disliked the two-week schedule, wanted a different schedule and started a petition to try to convince the administration to return to the previous year’s schedule.

“I wanted my voice and my opinion, along with the rest of the student body, to be heard,” Evans said. [...]

To continue reading the story, scan this QR code with a smartphone.

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 17

Some suggestion that I have, that would help to integrate immigrant and to make them feel at home in our news | feature community members to be more tolerant and understanding of different cutters and language we want to learn English, but it takes time and hard work. Sometimes people don’t want to take the time to help people who are

learning English. They assume we don’t want to communicate when we do.

Another suggestion would be for the America, community to remember that we are country built on immigrant and that it may not have been very long ago that someone in their own family was new to united states and was experiencing the same problems and adjustments as more current immigrants are faced with faced with today. The differences that today, immigrants are probably not as welcomed into the community as wanted. This kind of relates to me when I

FINDING HOME FROM

came from Africa, not everyone was nice to me even adults. We all need to help the people in need because it is very hard to get use to new life or things that you have not touched or seen or even eaten before and it takes

5,000

it doesn’t matter where that person is from We have to love each other as one.

time. I hope we all love each other

or live or what their

cultures are.

An immigrant. Who is an immigrant? An immigrant is a person who has a citizenship in one country but who enters a different country to set up a permanent residence. Immigrants from all over the world come to the United States of America and other countries for many purpose, like for work, education and for money. Some were brought as slaves a couple hundred years ago.

It is hard to people move from another country and get used to the people and the environments. It is also hard to learn another language apart from your language. It is hard how you think other people will treat you, where you settle and other things.

From herimmigrants family’s hardships I believe that experienceintegrating is a life long influence. Some immigrants have problems in their language barriers, legal immigrants’ problem, assimilation, into the U.S., East freshman racism Alexis alienation, home sickness. Other issues include under-employment relative Afriyie to education level and barriers to basic shares her observations throughservice such as health care. I is also hard getting permission to stay in your host country longer that originally intended to since you entered the country on temporary visa One common her immigration essay. issue since your immigrants status as defined by your visa (entry documents) only entitles you to do certain things.

I am an immigrant and I have some of these problems. Indeed, most non-citizens are not even eligible for the

MILES AWAY

story jasmine tuazon | photos michael tedesco | infographic anna villaver

T

his is a story about intolerance––and not.

This is a story about how three sisters left their family and friends and home in search of job and educational opportunities in the U.S. This is a story about having to rebuild, assimilate, understand.

This is a story about true bravery and strength. *** Ghana was a place with no coldness, where temperatures ranged from 70 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Large buildings of brick, rock and sand dotted the Atasomanso-Santasi community, where people may speak any combination of nine government-supported local languages and English. Small family shops with goods brought from 160 miles away from the capital of Accra accompanied the fronts of various homes.

After school, the Afriyie sisters, Alexis, Christiana and Amma, would walk a mile from Andy Grace Academy to their house, where Grandma Cecelia and Aunt Peggy lived.

Sometimes, they would watch over Grandma’s store, which sold vegetables and beverages.

Other times, they decided to practice the playful, upbeat Ghanaian Azonto dance. Many times they could have been found playing with 20 of their friends in the large plot of land inside the gates of their home.

A home that was bought by their mother, Lydia Adutwumwaa, who was working more than 5,000 miles away to provide it for them.

Lydia had decided to come to the U.S.

18 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

in 2005 because of opportunities for both employment and education that were not as easily attainable in Ghana, where she used to sell books and stationaries after having graduated only from high school.

According to Alexis, the sisters did not go with their mom to the U.S. because they did not know if she was going to succeed. Fortunately, Lydia was able to go to nursing school at the International Institute of Rhode Island.

At the same time, because Lydia left Ghana when Alexis, Christiana and Amma were seven, five and three-years-old, respectively, the family had to put in extra effort to keep their bonds strong.

“Our grandma and aunt pretty much took care of us our entire lives,” Alexis says. “We saw our mom’s pictures, but we didn’t really know her that much. When she would visit us for a month twice a year, we would go to restaurants a lot to talk and get to know each other.”

After Lydia earned enough money for her kids to come to the U.S. and filed for them to be legal permanent residents, the mother and daughters planned to be reunited in the U.S. in July 2010.

Alexis, Christiana and Amma first found out they would be moving two weeks beforehand. A month beforehand, Aunt Peggy accompanied them on more than five trips to Accra to get passports, shots and files in order. When their uncle Gabriel Adu-Osei made a visit from his home in Canada to Ghana two weeks later, he announced the move to the girls.

On July 6, 2010, the sisters packed a single suitcase with a toothbrush and an extra set of clothes per girl, made some last minute goodbyes, and headed off for the Accra airport.

“The day we moved, we went back to the school before leaving to say our goodbyes,” Christiana said. “When we first landed in the U.S., I was scared. It was the first time I was going to see my mom in a while, and I thought [people at the airport] were going to ask me questions, even though I wasn’t good at English.”

As soon as their mom picked them up from the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, they went to eat Chinese food and picked up some new clothes from the local mall, which was much bigger than the one in Ghana.

They then drove to Rhode Island to stay at the house of a family friend. A week later, because of their mom’s job, they moved to Meadow Ridge Apartments in Ohio.

But for one reason or another, Lydia and her daughters have yet to live in one place for too long. Every few months, something would happen that forced them to pack their bags.

At one apartment, a landlord received noise complaints about the girls (who claim, “You could make as much noise as you wanted in Ghana”) and told the family to leave. Other places, the family had to move because they were not close enough to their girls’ schools in the Lakota Local School District. At one point, they were even driven out because of bed bugs.

news | feature After living in Meadow Ridge Apartments, a rental house in Forest Park, The Willows of Springdale and Lakota Lake Apartments in West Chester, the family has a little peace in Union Station Apartments. No stern landlords.

No long drives to school. No bed bugs.

But there are some issues the sisters faced that would not go away by moving from apartment to apartment.

“I think about Ghana all the time,” Alexis said. “I miss my friends and my family. Because we don’t really know anyone, we don’t play with others the same way as we did in Ghana.

Here, we’re always inside watching TV.” The three sisters were excited to get out of the house and meet other children when school began––but it was not as easy as they thought it would be.

“In Africa, when you are new to a school, even though the people don’t know you, they all come around you and want to make you feel happy,” Alexis said. “Here, you have to go up to people just to make friends.”

And when people did come up to her, sometimes it was for the wrong reason.

“On the first day of school, some people made fun of my hair, my accent, my skin color,” Alexis said. “They teased me because I was from Africa.”

Even after moving up from middle school to high school, Alexis said that she still faces bullying.

“I didn’t go up to them or ask anything because it would bring drama, and I didn’t want to do anything to get my mom mad,” said Alexis, who is now an East freshman. “They still do it though. Now those people give me dirty looks. In the hallways, there is sort of a ‘black gang,’ and if you scream or yell at them [because they provoked you], they’ll all come up to you and––do things.”

Even so, Christiana faced worse bullying than either of her sisters.

“On January 13, 2012, some kids beat me up and threw all my stuff away,” Christiana said. “They hated me because I came from Africa and didn’t know how to speak English.

I told my mom, sisters and some friends about it, but we didn’t really do anything about it.

Everyone just said to ignore it.”

The sisters are a part of a larger issue of bullying that many students who learn English as a second language face in school. According to a New England Equity Assistance Center’s Equity Climate Survey, 49 percent of middle school English-learning students responded ALWAYS, OFTEN or SOMETIMES to “Students make fun of others who have accents,” compared to 21 percent of nonEnglish-learning students.

When they are home, the sisters are able to stay in each other’s comfort. But Lydia is often busy.

Lydia is a Certified Nursing Assistant at Mercy’s nursing home, and she works parttime at the Meadowbrook Care Center in Montgomery once a week.

“I get up at 5 a.m. and work from 6:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.,” Lydia said. “I take care of patients three days a week, four days if I work overtime.

If I can have overtime, I take it—if I work full time without overtime, we won’t survive.”

Because she is responsible for taking care of four people by herself, Lydia says that living in the U.S. is more stressful than when she lived in Ghana. “[In Ghana,] I just worked in a store and sold things,” Lydia said. “I didn’t have to move to different places all the time like I do here, and I didn’t have to work as hard. Now I am a single mother and have to do everything by myself to earn our daily bread, pay the bills and get my kids a good education.”

Six months after they moved to the U.S., Grandma Cecelia passed away in Ghana, and the girls had to be completely dependent on their mother.

To keep faith in their pursuit of a new life, despite all the unexpected challenges they have faced, the girls and their mother have found a community for them at their Ghanaian church, Alpha and Omega.

“At church, we sing African music and dance, and my sisters and I get to help with

Bank of

1 Ghanaian One Cedi

$0.53 U. S. Dollar

25 25

x41 the size

Ghana is about the size of Michigan

Information CIA World Factbook, www.numbeo.com

1 1 1

sideNote:

IMMIGRATION ESSAY CONTEST sidebar madison shelton

Rabbi Ingber’s father spent time in a refugee camp during the Holocaust where he met his mother, who gave birth to him shortly after arriving in the United States.

Today, Ingber works at Xavier University’s Office of Interfaith Community Engagement. His family history inspired him to create the first annual Xavier Immigration Essay Contest, which gave young individuals the chance to explore their family history and share their stories.

Despite it being the first year of the contest, students from 20 different ethnic backgrounds and 30 high schools in the Cincinnati area sent in essays.

All entries were read without regard to the writers’ names by a panel of five judges which included Chief Diversity Director at University of Cincinnati Mitchel Livingston, Center for the Study of the American Dream (CSAD) employee Kat Ryder and Ingber himself.

Students could tell their own personal immigration story or one of a friend, family member or neighbor. The flexibility in the requirements for the essays exist so that more young people are involved in the contest, according to Ingber.

Along with the immigration issues, many essays presented themes related to the American Dream. As someone who studies the American Dream, Ryder works to define the public’s changing views on what the American Dream is through surveys and focus groups.

“Immigrants keep the fire of the American Dream alive,” Ryder said. “It’s a natural fit that we [at the CSAD] would sponsor a contest that celebrates them.”

Because of the partnership between the CSAD, Interfaith Community Engagement and Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the six writers of the winning essays were given $1,000 scholarships or iPads for sharing their immigration stories.

According to Ryder, the best essays were genuine, honest and clearly showed a deep connection to the immigration topic.

“Students were very aware of families’ relation to the immigrant experience,” Ingber said. “[We’re all] honored to be in this exchange.” SM

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 19

news | feature

Alexis has attended Alpha and Omega church with her sisters and mother almost every Sunday for the past two years to worship and relax with their family friends.

the little kids, take them to their classes and sit down to talk about school,” Alexis says. “The other adults there take care of us like we are their kids. We stay over at their houses and watch movies and cook, and sometimes we go shopping together.”

One such person is family friend Linda Osei-Poku, who is the daughter of the church’s bishop and an active member during sermons.

“The girls’ mom visited our church and really liked it, so one day she brought her daughters to our house to introduce them to us,” Osei-Poku says. “They were young, nice and sweet. They supported each other, and if I ever need help, I can just call and they’ll be there.”

According to several members of the church, the family has been present during services almost every Sunday for the past two years. In contrast to the confusion, misunderstandings and homesickness that fills most of the family’s days, the Church has provided the family a community to ease the pain of transitioning to life in America. *** In eighth grade, Alexis’s English as a Second Language teacher, Laura Kennedy, from Lakota Ridge junior high promised to give the class extra credit for participating in Xavier University’s Immigration Essay contest.

Alexis tried it out in an attempt to also earn a little scholarship money, by writing about the

20 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

COMPARISON OF LIVING

ghana

usa

Life Expectancy

61.45 Years

78.49 Years Literacy rate

67.3%

99%

average salary

$352.45/ month

$352.45/ month

Information CIA World Factbook, www.numbeo.com

hardships that her family and relatives faced coming to the U.S. and proposing a solution for how to assimilate immigrants.

Then on Sept. 14, Alexis’s essay was announced second place out of the essays submitted from over 20 different cultural backgrounds.

“When I heard that Alexis had won the essay contest, I was not surprised at all. Alexis has always had fascinating things to share about her life in Africa, and she has always been very good at expressing her feelings and experiences through her writing,” Kennedy said. “Because her school [in Ghana] was very different, it has been amazing to watch Alexis adapt and adjust to school in the U.S.” And while the family has managed to assimilate themselves into their community, Alexis spoke for both her sisters and her mom in her essay when she discussed the hardships of a immigrants.

“Sometimes people don’t want to take time to help people who are learning English. They assume we don’t want to communicate when we do,” Alexis wrote. “[Americans should] remember that we are a country built on immigrants, and it may not have been very long ago that someone in their own family was new to the United States and was experiencing the same problems and adjustments as immigrants today. We have to love each other as one because we are citizens of this planet.” SM

lifestyle | feature

Meet Bryan

Making itwork story dillon mitchell I photo ellen fleetwood

East junior Bryan Chamberlin has lived his entire life with only one arm. Refusing to let the handicap define him, Chamberlin still enjoys outdoor activities like fishing and hunting—even if it is with a modified pole or crossbow.

P

robably the hardest thing I have to do is open a bag of chips.”

East junior Bryan Chamberlin is grinning at his joke. He does that a lot, he admits. Jokes about his handicap.

While in the womb, Bryan suffered from Amniotic Band Syndrome, a condition caused by an entrapment of fetal parts in fibrous amniotic bands. One in every 1,200 live births is affected by Amniotic banding. It can affect a single digit or an entire limb. In Bryan’s case, the latter, amputating his right arm from the elbow down. But it’s never slowed him down.

In fact, Bryan approaches every new challenge with a can-do attitude. He enjoys fishing, utilizing a modified fishing pole (his friend, East junior Evan Striker, swears he once caught a shark in Myrtle Beach), and he hunts with a crossbow balanced across his handicapped arm.

It’s like that in social situations too. Bryan says he’s never had a problem with bullying, even in elementary school. His 26-yearold sister, Tara, says it’s because he never gave anyone a chance, remembering when a neighborhood girl rode her bike up to Bryan, who was playing outside, and asked him, “What’s wrong with you?” And he responded with “there’s nothing wrong with me.”

“It’s almost like she was looking to pick on him,” Tara says. “But he didn’t allow it.”

Bryan’s father, Mike, describes his attitude as Bryan putting on a “tougher image,” but Bryan says it’s just his bright outlook on life. If you ask him what caused it, he’ll insist he’s been that way from the start.

East junior Bryan Chamberlin, who suffered from Amniotic Band Syndrome in the womb, is still able to hunt with a modified crossbow.

“Going into it, you have to expect people to smile disappeared during the interview. The act differently,” Bryan says. “People joke about first time, he was talking about what it’s like [my arm] but it’s never in a mean way.” when little kids stare at him. The second time, Bryan has always led a normal life because he was talking about his mother, Pam. that’s how he was raised. His family has always Pam died of brain cancer in 2005. Bryan, treated him like they would any other child. nine at the time, was “bothered,” as Mike puts Mike even rewired the gas and brakes onto it, by his mother’s confusion over her illness the left handle of an electric scooter so Bryan and sudden frailty. It forced Bryan to grow up could ride along with his friends. quickly, pushing him to learn how to do more “We just encouraged him by telling him things on his own, like cooking breakfast. He that he could do anything was never bitter about it anyone else could,” Mike though. Rather, he put on says. “No one really saw his “tougher image,” taking him as handicapped in care of his mother by anyway. If there were bringing her blankets and some things he needed spending time watching to read more help with, he usually TV with her. Tara says lifestyle stories figured it out on his own.”

Bryan understood, despite Despite that desire for about East students his young age, the severity normalcy, Bryan avoids the of his mother’s illness.

Scan to read this story and more use of a prosthetic arm.

According to Mike, seeing He originally wore one his mother ill scared from the time he was six months old until he Bryan, but he never showed it. was five years old, beginning with a basic hook “Usually she was so full of life, and then model. Eventually he switched to a model that she was incapacitated to the point where she allowed for the hook to open and close when couldn’t help out around the house. She used to Bryan stretched his arm. Bryan says he stopped give him attention all the time,” Mike says. “He wearing a prosthetic arm simply because he didn’t really act differently. That’s how he is, he didn’t like it, but Tara has her own theory. doesn’t show how he’s feeling.”

“He was on a soccer team when he was It’s less of Bryan hiding his feelings, and young, and when he was running up and down more of him staying happy. Because for every the field, his [prosthetic] arm would fly up and bad thing that has happened to Bryan, he keeps hit him in the face,” Tara says. his spirits up. And he keeps on joking.

Regardless, Bryan has lived his life as “Sometimes a kid will ask me if I’m right or normally as he can, and it’s difficult to catch left handed,” Bryan says. him in a bad mood. There were two times his His grin is back. SM

Go Online to:

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www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 21

faithful family

Right: East juniorBrianna Narciso sits with her scripture. Bottom Left: The mormon scripture sits on the table, illustrating the large size of the book. Top Left: On Sundays, teenagers divide up into Young Men and Young Women groups.

Ever since Mitt Romney joined the presidential race, Mormonism has been under public scrutiny. East families speak about their experiences following the religion and on the importance of family. story alexa chryssovergis | photos ellen fleetwood | infographic john klassen

t

heir house is fairly small, although it was once inhabited by nine people. It’s a normal two-story home, but what sets it apart from the brown and red brick facades to its right and left is its clean, white color and the huge porch that stretches across the front door.

“This porch that we have out here, we built that.”

David Narciso smiles with what appears to be pride. But that is not what makes his lips twitch up at the corner. David smiles because of a fond memory, sparked by the mention of the white superstructure.

He is remembering the day that the porch was assembled, and how 30 of his friends from his church Ward pitched in to construct the porch. David emphasizes that the magnitude of the task would have been far too difficult for his family alone.

“We’re all children of our Heavenly Father, so we’re all brothers and sisters in that way,” David says. “And the [church] is like a big family. When people are having troubles, they help each other.”

East junior Brianne Narciso cranes her neck to look up at her dad standing next to her. The resemblance is evident in their dark hair, lively eyes and barely-there smiles.

“We call our ward our ‘Ward Family.’

Everyone knows everyone,” Brianne says.

22 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

“People move in and out [and] things change, but we all love each other anyway.”

Standing next to Brianna is her younger sister Aubrey Narciso, who stays quiet throughout the majority of the conversation.

Both are captured in a vibrant picture on a wall in the family room along with a bride and two other girls.

“All the women in the family,” says Lorinda Narciso, the girls’ mother, regarding the photograph. In the background, a bright white Chapel towers over the girls. It is the Mormon temple in San Diego.

The Narcisos are actively practicing Mormons who attend church at the Liberty Ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), made up of two separate congregations that meet on Sunday for Sacrament service.

Every Sunday at 9 a.m., Brianne and her four other family members drive to church and are there for three hours. The Narcisos take a seat together in the simple chapel, surrounded by other families and the mildly quiet noises of children. Bishop Glenn Schrecengost stands at the head of the deep room, extending a warm welcome to any potential newcomers, and the service begins with the congregation singing along to “Faith of Our Fathers.”

Back at her house, Lorinda begins to slice tomatoes for lunch with what seems to be a

twinge of frustration.

“We’re normal like everybody else,” Lorinda says. “A lot of people will come up and say, ‘You don’t believe in Jesus Christ,’ and I just think, ‘That’s the name of our church.’ The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.”

According to Lorinda, although Mormons believe in Jesus, God and the Holy Ghost as separate beings, rather than believing in a Holy Trinity, they are still as Christian as it gets, a fact not recognized by many.

Lorinda pauses from her chopping, wipes her hands on a towel and stands still.

“My grandmother would brush my hair and look for horns because I’m Mormon,” Lorinda says, “and [I would think], ‘Are you kidding?’”

Brianne, East senior Zach Williams, East junior Mary Casto and East sophomore Anna Casto, who are all Mormons, face constant misinterpretations about their faith.

“I’ve had someone [say to] me, ‘I thought you guys had 10 years of food storage in your basement,’” Anna says. “Where did that come from?”

Mary looks at her sister, smiles wryly and agrees.

“People seem to think that we’re the same as Amish people,” Mary says.

The two older sisters are sitting in a loveseat while their younger sister Rachel Casto is sandwiched in between their parents, Lawanna

lifestyle | indepth

Mormon interstate: Afterlife

Celestial Kingdom 1 Corinthians 15: 41 The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.

infographic john klaassen

Millennium

Starting below you can take a step-by-step process through the Mormon afterlife.

Judgment

This is the 1000 years after Jesus’ second coming where he will reign personally on earth.

God will judge each person on what they have done and their obedience of God and their acceptance of Jesus

Spirit paradise This is where the spiritually righteous go after death.

DEATH

Second death

Spirit prison This is where the spiritually wicked or unrepented go after death.

and Robert Casto. The youngest child is Zachary Casto, a tiny boy with sandy hair, clear eyes and a shy yet broad smile. He sits on a small chair to the right of the rest of the family.

“There’s a lot of myth, mystery and misinformation out there,” Robert says. “That became evident during the election cycle.”

Mary says that the main thing that sets their faith apart from other Christian faiths is their unique compilation of scripture, which not only consists of the Holy Bible, but also of The Book of Mormon. Instead of speaking of God’s interactions with the people of the Eastern hemisphere as in the Bible, the scripture tells tales of God’s influence in the Americas.

The young women of the church consult their fat books of scripture in the third hour of church, flipping the pages or scrolling on their smart phones. All of the 16 and 17 year olds of the congregation are cramped in a small room, with chairs arranged in a circle, smashed against the walls. After the hour-long Sacrament Service and an hour-long Sunday School class, the male and female adolescents split into Young Men and Young Women.

Sister Claire Schrecengost leads her class in a discussion of how to maintain their faith while also participating in secular activities.

“You can’t live in this world and not get dirty. Everyone gets spotted,” Claire says to the teens. She speaks enthusiastically about repentance being the solution, and her emotion overcomes her as tears form in the corners of her eyes and her throat tightens up.

“We try to live what we call in the world, but not of the world,” Mary explains. “We’re going to do most of the things that everybody

This level is for complete separation from God. This level is for ones who didn’t repent their sins.

else does.”

The girls around the circle offer examples of things that could “spot” them in their secular life. A girl named Alison Johnson is called upon, and she raises her timid voice to tell of her struggle to block out immodest language from school.

Across from her in the circle, a girl with thick, curly dark hair empathizes. “[Their faith] really helps the kids,” says Robert. “It gives [them] a way to group together and make friends easily. Since we have the same kind of morals, the same kinds of beliefs, it is easier to build relationships.”

Mary and Brianne chime in with the rest of the girls about how to live a simple, humble life and how to shape their actions around the Word of Wisdom, a code by which Mormons are meant to live.

This includes dressing modestly, which all the girls in the tightly-cramped room have done. Their clothes aren’t super tight, and their skirts are down to the knee. Claire pulls out an iPad and shows them a video that relates to self-respect and relays the message that they should love themselves. It is an adorable mock-music video to “You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful” performed by boys from another Ward of LDS. The laughter of all the young women fills up the small room.

“It’s support,” Williams says. “All my really good friends are in the church. We’ve got a really close bond. Because of my faith, I can have comfort. They’re the ones whom I can turn to.”

Although Brianne has many good friends who attend church with her, it is evident that

This level is compared to the sun; it is the highest degree of heaven. One would live with their eternal family on this level.

When one is in this level one is with one’s eternal family. The requirements are: faith in Jesus, repenting one’s sins, baptism and receiving the Holy Ghost.

Terrestial Kingdom This middle level is compared to the moon.

One would not live as an eternal family but on their own here.

The requirements are: honorable life on earth but did not accept Jesus.

Telestial Kingdom This level is compared to the stars. One will also live on their own at this level. People who never accepted Jesus and did not repent for one’s sins go here. information LDS.org, mormonwiki.com, utlm.org, biblegateway.com

within her own family, she has another set of friends, ones who will literally be with her for all eternity according to Lorinda.

“We believe that the family can continue on after this life that we have,” Lorinda says.

Any hint of annoyance or laughter has left her voice, and the lines in her face are serious, but not stern. “I’m married not just for time, but for time and eternity. We’d still know each other in heaven. It’s not like we’d forget.”

Every family that attends church at LDS is supposed to spend one night out of the week with family, learning and bonding over faith.

The Castos usually have a short, five-minute lesson, due to what Robert describes to be an eight-year-old’s short attention span.

Lawanna Casto, Mary’s mother, has felt the benefits of having her family as a support system her entire life.

“It helps with being in the world, but not of the world,” Lawanna says. “[When] we’re trying to avoid those bad things, [it helps to] have someone sticking up for us. When [my siblings and I] need to pull together, we’re all there for each other.”

It’s hard for the Castos or the Narcisos to find one aspect of their life that is not affected by their faith, as their secular and religious lives are completely intertwined.

“It provides an anchor in your life,” Lawanna says. “It doesn’t matter what age you are; it always influences [the choices you make]. It molds the person that I am.”

Anna quietly interjects herself into the conversation, offering up a simpler answer that sums up her mother’s response.

“It’s pretty much everything we do except for sleep.” SM

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 23

lifestyle | indepth

a

spoonful of sugar creatine

East seniors Connor Wyatt and Alan Yates use creatine, a supplement that can be taken in powder or pill form, in order to increase their muscle mass.

Creatine, however, has been known to have side effects.

e

story jake knock I photos ellen fleetwood and justin york | infographic abbey russell

ast senior Alan Yates always hated his baby fat.

The jokes about his weight that he received from family and friends just added to his desire to get rid of it. The people close to him in his life only fueled the shame that he felt about his body.

“Most of the ridicule I got from being fat was from my brother, who has always been able to eat anything without worrying about gaining body fat,” Yates says, who, at 5-foot-10 and 175 pounds, was ashamed of his body. “It got to the point where I was ashamed to walk around my house without a shirt on because I knew I would be made fun of.”

By the middle of his junior year, Yates decided that he was going to make a drastic change in his lifestyle and begin to lose the weight. So Yates started to lift.

He realized he couldn’t do it alone. Yates needed something that would build his muscle, shed his baby fat and give him confidence in his body for the first time. What he discovered was creatine, a dietary supplement that, according to Koji Moy, a customer service representative at bodybuilding.com, “builds muscle, endurance, and stamina during a workout.” Yates is one of the many people who uses creatine before

a workout to help increase muscle size and continues using it for its ongoing effects.

“After the first week of taking creatine, I noticed an increase in the size of my muscles and my strength,” says Yates, who, by this time, had grown to 5-foot-11 and now weighs in at 180 pounds of pure muscle. “My muscles only grew slightly, so I knew creatine wouldn’t give me results like steroids, but I continued to take it. However, over time I noticed larger increases in size.”

Moy points out that creatine is one of the most widely used supplements for bodybuilders “It is one of the most popular supplements,” Moy says. “It is the most proven substance in the bodybuilding community.”

Even though it was outlawed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) because it is considered to be a performance enhancing drug, creatine is one of the most widely used supplements on the market. A study done by creatinemonohydrate. net claimed that over 5.5 million pounds of creatine were sold in the past year.

According to Moy, creatine is a naturally occurring substance that helps with cell hydration and recovery to increase one’s strength.

Over 5.5 million pounds of creatine were sold in the past year.

24 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

“Creatine goes into the bloodstream and hopefully saturates the muscles,” Moy says.

“When it does, it will give you that size and strength increase.”

The ways in which creatine is utilized vary from person to person. Some people take a serving of creatine before or after workouts, while others take creatine over the course of the entire day.

East senior Connor Wyatt takes half of his creatine serving before his workout and the other half after. Taking creatine in this spacedout fashion causes the body to ingest it more efficiently.

“The body can only absorb so much,” Moy says. “You need to either take it in small amounts or take a fast absorbing type such as HCI.” Wyatt was not seeing the results that he wanted in the gym and needed help to boost his performance. He uses creatine because he believes it the best supplement on the market. “[With creatine], you can do two or three more reps than you could usually do,” Wyatt says. “It gives you that little extra boost.”

In addition to the performance increases, Yates takes five grams of creatine before each workout to increase his stamina and strength.

Yates says that the only downside he has ever heard of is bloating from the increased water in the cells. Studies have shown, however, that the negatives of creatine are more extensive.

Creatine works by giving all muscular cells of the body the ability to retain more water.

These muscular cells include smooth cells (organs), skeletal muscle cells (biceps, triceps, etc.) and cardiac muscle cells (the heart). After increased usage of the supplement, muscles can contain up to 75 percent water, which can

lifestyle | indepth

supplement that has had many downsides in the past, he or she is greatly increasing his or her chances of having a negative side effect from it in the future. Many teens today who want muscular size are looking for a fast solution without first focusing their attention on the basics of building muscle.”

Even after being notified of the potential downsides of creatine use, Yates still believes it is the supplement that got him on the right track to becoming physically fit.

“I restrict myself to only five grams of creatine a day to make sure I am not hurting my kidneys and liver,” Yates says. “However, with proper use, I still believe creatine to be one of the safer supplements on the market today.”

Yates’ mother, Jan, supports Alan’s use of creatine because she agrees that it has changed his life for the better.

“We are skeptical of some supplements Alan takes,” Jan says. “But as long as he shows us researched proof that they are safe, then I am fully behind him taking the supplement.”

On the other hand, Westerman still feels that teens who use creatine are at a high risk of health issues as a result of it.

“I would not recommend creatine to my younger clients,” Westerman says. “Having a heart attack at the age of 16 or 17 is not good by any means.”

Yates has been notified of the risks that exist with creatine, but he still claims that he will continue to use creatine.

“Most of the risk comes from improper use,” Yates says, “so as long as I use it in the right way, I will be fine.”

Creatine is Yates’ number one choice for a dietary supplement and says that it is his favorite one that he has ever used.

“It got me into the best shape of my life,” Yates says. “What more could I have asked for?” SM

East senior Connor Wyatt takes creatine in the form of pills. He takes half of his creatine dosage before workouts and half after.

Get the facts

Supplement or Hazard? benefits of creatine Enhances athletic performance and helps builds body mass

infomation bodybuilding.com, ehow.com, enotes.com

be harmful for the cardiac muscle cells.

Fitworks Personal Trainer Doug Westerman has had past experience with creatine and the way it affects a person’s body.

“When creatine goes [into the body] it does not differentiate between which muscle it is going to, so it goes into all of the muscle cells,” Westerman says. “What these wrestlers want to do is bulk up and then, right before the competition, shed water weight. When doing that, [the wrestlers] are not only hitting the skeletal muscles, [but they] are hitting the cardiac muscle as well. [They] are making their hearts shrink, yet [the supplement] is supposed to work and take care of the bodies that have been enlarged.”

This rapid shrinking of the heart can even lead to heart attacks. When the heart is decreased in size, the amount of blood traveling in and out decreases. This makes it impossible for the heart to function properly, and leads to blocked arteries. This blockage of the blood pathways to the heart can induce heart attacks.

Dr. Robert Wallace, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital, says that teenagers need to be careful about their approach to using supplements because of the possible health detriments.

“When it comes to supplementing, teens need to start with a basic approach,” Wallace says. “They need to first maximize their protein [intake] and create building blocks to later improve upon.”

Many doctors and personal trainers do not recommend the use of creatine to teenagers not only because of past accidents, such as an incident in 1997 when three college wrestlers were killed from abusing the supplement, but also because not much is known about how it reacts in teenagers.

“When a person is in their teens, the body is still growing,” Wallace says. “By adding a

Lowers levels of Homocysteine, which is connected to heart disease Found to improve brain function and help shortterm memory

Hazards of creatine Causes weight gain, which is initially water weight that turns to muscle weight Has been proven to cause kidney damage if taken in too high of doses Requires high doses in addition to exercise in order to experience results

East senior Alan Yates works out at Fitworks in West Chester. Before his workouts, he drinks creatine powder that has been mixed with water.

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 25

lifestyle | indepth

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story ka

a

s East senior Mark Green* walked into the hookah bar, he kept his head down. At only 16 years old, he stood back from the counter as his legal-aged-friends ordered and then quickly hurried to the bar’s basement because he was afraid of getting in trouble.

The workers were supposed to ID him. But they

East student smokes flavored tobacco from the hookah she got for her birthday.

26 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

didn’t.

A hookah bar is a place where people can smoke flavored tobacco using hookah pipes. The tobacco, known as shisha, sits in a clay bowl with punctured foil over it placed at the top of the hookah. To produce the smoke, ignited coals are placed on top of the foil. This heats the shisha up, and the smoke travels through the water at the base of the hookah. Shisha users simply inhale through the hose attached to a hookah much like they would if they were smoking a cigarette. Some users consider it relaxing while others experience a slight “buzz” during use.

Green’s main reason for using hookah is not because of the feeling he gets from it. It’s because “after 11 p.m. in West Chester, there is pretty much nothing else to do.”

Green isn’t the only one drawn in by this lifestyle. According to a study done by Dr. Brian Primack, published in an issue of the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research, 1 in 3 college students have smoked hookah before. At East, 19 percent of 320 students surveyed have tried it at least once.

With the majority of East students under 18 years of age, not every hookah user at East is allowed to smoke hookah legally, or enter a hookah bar. According to the Ohio Revised Code 2151.87, it’s illegal to sell tobacco products, which includes hookah.

Green noticed that people were rarely carded when visiting hookah bars. In certain hookah bars, workers wouldn’t even ID people who were wearing high school sweatshirts, which made their youth apparent.

But in late August, Green was finally carded after numerous trips to multiple hookah bars across the area by a worker at Starbuzz Hookah Cafe.

His older friend was having a get-together for his birthday at Starbuzz, but as Green walked in, he was stopped by a waitress asking to see his ID. Thinking she wouldn’t actually check the date, Green handed her his card along with his two legal age friends

lifestyle | indepth

without breaking a sweat. She looked at the first one. Legal. The second one, also legal. She got to Green’s ID last and paused.

“1995?” she asked quizzically. After sincerely apologizing, she abided by the law and asked him to leave. To Green, the experience wasn’t a huge deal. “[Getting carded] is not anything to get worked up about,” Green says. “They don’t call the cops. They are just trying to follow the law.”

Since then, Green has not been to a hookah bar, but he continues to use his friends’ hookah pipes.

Aside from the illegality of hookah smoking, another major issue is the health risks that most users do not realize, University of California health psychologist Anna Song told Spark.

“I think that hookah use is increasing because it’s becoming more available and people don’t know about the dangers surrounding hookah use,” says Song, who studies decision-making in young people in deciding to smoke and is part of the Center of Tobacco Control Research and Education. “In fact, I’ve heard of young people who would never smoke a cigarette go out and try hookahs because they think hookahs are safer.”

Shisha contains the same carcinogens and chemicals as cigarettes, including nicotine. Because of this, hookah usage, like smoking, can cause cancer, and gum and respiratory diseases according to Neal Benowitz, University of California Professor of Medicine and Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences.

Green has never had many concerns about what using hookah could do to his body. When he first tried hookah during spring break his junior year, Green had already been a cigarette smoker for about 10 months. Although he worried about the effects of smoking in general, he didn’t think using hookah would add to the previously mentioned problems that cigarettes already create.

One difference between smoking cigarettes and smoking hookah is the duration of time a smoker is exposed to nicotine.

Because the shisha used in the hookah pipes can last for up to an hour, the health effects of one sitting of shisha are the same as the effects of having ten cigarettes.

According to Benowitz, Green is also exposed to large quantities of carbon monoxide, which is brought about by the burning of coals used to create the smoke.

“Levels of carbon monoxide are much higher in hookah smokers than cigarette smokers because you are taking big puffs of charcoal,” says Benowitz, who is also a member of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. “If you have heart disease, carbon monoxide is terrible for you.”

Another problem, specific to smoking hookah, is the ability to easily spread diseases. Multiple people typically share one hookah.

Some hookah bars, however, offer removable mouth pieces to limit the spread of bacteria.

Although doctors are fairly certain the results of smoking hookah will be similar the results of using cigarettes, there is much less research done on the effects of smoking hookah than that done on the effects of smoking cigarettes. Originating in the Middle East, hookah hasn’t been around in America for very long, so scientists have not been able to do many long term studies.

“On average it takes smokers [of cigarettes] 20 years to develop lung cancer so you have to follow people for more than 20 years to know that smoking causes lung cancer,” Benowitz says.

“And if [a large enough group of] people have only been using hookah for five or six years in the U.S., no one has had time to see what it does. At the moment, we are sort of depending on science research in the Middle East where hookah has been used much longer.”

Although Benowitz thinks hookah is detrimental to one’s health, he believes it to be considerably healthier than cigarettes because most people, like Green, who currently uses it about every two weeks, don’t use hookah every day.

One thing scientists are largely unsure about is whether hookah can be addictive. Benowitz says that it could be if a person were to use it often enough, like cigarettes. However, Green has not shown signs of addiction.

“In my experience the more I smoked hookah with people, the less they wanted to smoke hookah,” Green says. “If we smoked hookah three times in one week, we would never go back for a fourth because people would say, ‘Oh, I’m tired of hookah. Let’s just go get coffee.’”

Benowitz’s main health concern is that when teenagers and young adults are introduced to nicotine through hookah, they’re more likely to find cigarettes more appealing.

Even individuals who smoke shisha but not cigarettes like East senior Suzie Stevens* enjoy the taste of shisha. Shisha comes in a variety of flavors including strawberry, mint and watermelon.

“Cigarettes are gross, and when you smoke a cigarette your breath smells,” Stevens says. “You can get cans of shisha and there are different flavors. It definitely doesn’t taste bad.” [cont. on 28]

AREAS OF THE BODY AFFECTED BY TOBACCO: MOUTH

In addition to stained teeth, bad breath and a chronic cough, oral and throat cancers and gum disease can be contracted.

BRAIN

Nicotine increases dopamine, creating pleasure, but can also cause addiction and can make users feel anxious, depressed, and moody after smoking.

HEART

Smoking increases heart rate and blood pressure, and can cause hardened arteries and heart disease.

LUNGS

Smoke causes reduced lung function, sometimes resulting in bronchitis. It leaves users more susceptible to emphysema or lung cancer.

FERTILITY

BONES & SKIN

Smoking can cause damage to reproductive organs, decreased fertility or complete infertility and increased risk for miscarriage.

Nicotine, carbon monoxide and hydrogen weaken bone, possibly causing osteoperosis and making it harder for broken or fractured bones to recover. In addition, it causes dry, yellow and wrinkled skin. information livescience, american lung association

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 27

lifestyle | indepth Despite the appetizing flavor choices, Stevens and Green’s decisions to smoke hookah are mostly because of social reasons.

Stevens first tried it when she was with her family on vacation at Norris Lake when her sister’s boyfriend brought out his hookah. Upon seeing that she liked it, her sister, Maria*, gave her a hookah pipe for her 17th birthday. Her family, including her parents, now use it on vacations and holidays. “[Smoking shisha] is just something to do with your friends or with your family,” Stevens says. “It’s just fun, and when I smoke with my family, we sit around a table and just play Catch Phrase or cards.”

Because Stevens uses hookah while with her parents, it is legal according to the Ohio Revised Code. While minors can never purchase tobacco, they are allowed to use it only when with parents.

Stevens says that because her parents let her use it, she has a better sense of health security while smoking shisha.

“Because my parents let me, I don’t think it’s that bad,” Stevens says. “So many other things are bad for you, too.”

Starbuzz supervisor Ayeud Jasim agrees that using hookah is social and carries that idea over to his bar.

One Saturday evening, Starbuzz was filled with people wanting to smoke shisha. Guests mingle with one another as one blonde girl introduces herself to a group of three guys she has never met. Music plays loudly from the speakers and a pool table sits on one half of the room being used by a couple and two guys. Smoke drifts in the dimly lit air as people pass the hookah hose.

“People are coming here and smoking and having a fun time with their friends,” Jasim says. “[Smoking shisha] is better than someone smoking cigarettes. When someone comes here for one or two hours, it is good for him because maybe he saves three or four cigarettes.”

However, to Green, Jasim’s theory is inaccurate.

“I would never replace cigarettes with hookah because it is not mobile,” Green says. “It doesn’t provide the same experience for me in terms of relaxation.

[However,] a lot of people do try to replace cigarettes with hookah.”

Green knows there are health problems associated with hookah, but he says that he wouldn’t condemn the use of hookah altogether.

“I would recommend people don’t smoke cigarettes but I think hookah is alright in moderation,” Green says.

“I think if you are going more than once a week, you are overdoing it. Even once a week is overkill.” SM

1. Flavored tobacco is filled inside a bowl and hot charoal or wood cinders are placed on top, creating smoke which also contains traces of metals and carbon monoxide.

to the mouthpiece, which usually has a disposable mouthpiece attached.

28 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

FLAVORS FUZZY LEMON BLUE MIST SEX ON THE BEACH

2. The smoke

travels down the body through a sealed tube into the water jar.

SAFARI MOUNTAIN DEW

19 28 percent of 320 East students surveyed that have tried hookah before

4. The smoke

bubbles out of the water and travels up to the hose.

the smoke down and adds moisture to it.

5. The smoke travels through the hose

STARBUZZ CAFÉ

QUEEN OF SEX

3. The water cools information american lung association, bureau of health promotion and risk reduction, my employment lawyer, ayeud jasim, centers for disease control and prevention, livescience

BESTSELLING

OHIO’S LAWS:

18-

percent of high school seniors in the U.S. that said in 2011 that they smoked hookah

TOBACCO

CANNOT PURCHASE SHISHA. CAN ONLY SMOKE HOOKAH WHEN WITH PARENTS

LEGALLY USE A 18+ CAN HOOKAH WITH TOBACCO

For teens that smoke hookah, the odds are two times greater that they will become cigarette smokers.

One 40-45 minute session

=

lifestyle | east pinterest

East students “pin” their favorite items at the moment.

East Pinterest

as told to shervani patel | photos ellen fleetwood information target, guitarcenter.com, bhcosmetics.com and hp.com

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off $8

Ugg Australia Boots $190 “These boots are comfortable and I can wear them with anything in order to dress an outfit up or down.

Ugg Australia boots use a Twinface sheepskin material which adds a unique softness and feel compared to other brands.”

“This movie has a quirky plot and can always cheer me up. It’s a great movie for when you just need a laugh or want to take your mind off of things.”

Sophomore Grace Deutsch

Junior Kirsti Toms

BH Basics 88 Color Cool Shimmer Eyeshadow Palette $12 “This color eyeshadow palette adds sparkle to my eyes and has a variety of colors to choose from. It’s great for color mixing and stays all day.”

Junior Kirsti Toms

Scarves $15 “Scarves add texture and pops of color to an otherwise boring outfit.

They are by far my most favorite accessory. Scarves are great for the cold winters and even during other seasons to add originality and creativity to all outfits.”

Sophomore Grace Deutsch

Drum Pad and Sticks $35 “I’ve been banging around on tin cans and my dad’s trusty work desk since before I could walk, so naturally a drum stick and drum pad or two are a perfect practice preference for this rhythm-playing kind of guy.”

Junior Dylan James

HP Pavillion dv6 Laptop $500+ “My laptop is a good numbers machine with lots of functions and many operations. If you’re into videos or a wireless broadband satellite, then a computer’s the gadget of the year.”

Junior Dylan James www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 29

lifestyle | photoshoot

Madi Merchant and Lina Nelson model faux fur clothing.

Friend or Faux

With cold weather approaching, people often turn to fur clothing for warmth. For those not wishing to use animal products, an alternative of faux fur is becoming increasingly popular. story rachel hartwick | photos kenzie walters | models madi merchant and lina nelson

I

t was Christmas morning when East senior Sam Wheeler stormed out of her grandparents’ house––all because of a fur coat. It was a brown mink coat, about mid-calf length, that her wealthy grandfather bought for his wife.

As a vegetarian and an animal lover who doesn’t support the use of real fur in fashion, Wheeler was appalled. After getting nowhere through some bickering with her grandmother, Wheeler pulled up pictures and videos of animals being violently killed for their fur on the internet in an attempt to get her grandmother to listen to her, but nothing changed her mind. That’s when she called her dad, a fellow vegetarian and animal lover like

30 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

Wheeler, to pick her up and take her home.

“Yeah, a 14-year-old yelling at her 50-yearold grandma,” Wheeler says, thinking back to the incident. “I don’t agree with her having those coats, and she doesn’t see the problem.

She thinks that if she paid for it, she should be able to wear whatever she wants no matter what. But [these animals] have feelings. They have nerves. They feel pain. And we’re doing this for a coat––a coat.”

Wheeler doesn’t sit still when it comes to protesting the lack of animal rights. She donates over half of her paychecks to organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and Sierra Club, has signed more than 400 environment and

animal-related petitions on change.org, and has even spent up to 15 hours a week volunteering at the Animal Friends Humane Society.

“Anything I can do to bring awareness to this, I will do,” Wheeler says. “Animals can’t speak for themselves. They need people to speak for them.”

Wheeler is one of the 44 percent of girls at East who do not wear Ugg Australia (Ugg) boots, which, according to Ugg’s official website, are made of “Grade-A sheepskin which provides a more comfortable and durable material” as opposed to lesser quality synthetics, which “can be coarse, scratchy and non-breathable.”

According to Klay Meger, a customer

lifestyle | photoshoot service representative from Ugg, this “Grade-A sheepskin” is turned inside out in the boot and dyed with a natural vegetable dye which is not tested on animals. The full hides of sheep, he adds, are obtained from many different butchers as a byproduct of the food industry.

“I almost think we’re doing a good thing because we’re not letting the leftovers go to waste,” Meger says. “We’re proactive in using it since it’s already being slaughtered for food.

[We’re] actually using it for a product that makes people happy.”

East senior Sydney Martin, who owns 13 pairs of Ugg boots between her and her sister, is aware that Ugg boots are made from sheepskin but says that the comfort overrules that fact and wears them anyway.

“I don’t really think about [how they’re made of sheepskin] when I’m wearing them,” Martin says. “They’re just that comfortable.”

Wheeler, on the other hand, does not understand why some girls will knowingly wear boots made from sheepskin.

“I think girls [who wear Uggs] are completely ignorant to what goes into the production of those boots, but the boots are popular and they want to fit in,” Wheeler says.

“But they’re wearing a sheep on their feet.”

Although Ugg Boots are extremely popular among junior high and high school girls, there are many alternative brands like Xhileration and Muk Luks using faux fur. Ugg boots and boots that mimic the look of Uggs without using the skin of animals are not the only fauxfur fashion pieces trending this winter.

Donna Salyers, founder and owner of Donna Salyers’ Fabulous Furs (DSFF), an internationally recognized faux fur clothing company, exclusively told Spark that while many people are purchasing the company’s full-length faux fur coats, others use the faux fur to accessorize.

“The things that sell best for us are small pieces like handbags or boot-toppers, lots of fur-trim gloves, hats and scarves,” Salyers says, whose faux fur has been featured in Oprah, Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated and Allure magazines and worn by celebrities like Kate Moss. “[These are] small things that are inexpensive and add a

touch of fur.”

Salyers hasn’t always been a faux fur lover. twenty-three years ago, when she was on her way to buy a full-length mink coat, she heard Paul Harvey describing in a radio show how kittens were being skinned alive to make something called “mink teddy bears.”

“I never thought of my pets being turned into fur. How is that so different than any animal being skinned alive and turned into a stupid coat?” Salyers says. “I decided I could not do that, and I should start a business—and that’s what I did. It would be an alternative: ‘Okay, so you want a fur coat? Great.

I’ve got something that you’ll like just as well.’”

But according to Paul from the Montana Trappers Association, who preferred his last name not be released for privacy reasons, using real animals to make a coat comes with benefits.

To Paul, trapping is not inhumane––it’s a necessary wildlife management tool.

As a trapper, it is Paul’s job to control a certain population of animals. He does this by going to a designated spot in the wild and setting up a predetermined number of traps designed to catch a specific animal. Once he reaches the quota of animals, he stops trapping in that area.

“What [a trapper] does is harvest part of the population before the hard winter sets in [so that] the rest of the population can survive,” says Paul, who has been trapping for 50 years and has a master’s degree in wildlife biology.

“If a trapper comes in and harvests half of the beavers in that population, then there’s enough food for the rest of that population to survive through the winter.”

Paul believes that one of the biggest misconceptions with trappers is that they are often chastised for killing the animals that they trap in an inhumane fashion. One type of trap Paul often utilizes is a body-gripping trap, also known as a Conibear, which was developed in the early 1950s by Frank Conibear in an effort to provide a humane trap, as called for by animal rights groups. He says that animals caught in a Conibear are either killed instantly from a snapping of the neck and spine, or die within a minute, both of which are quicker than pulling a fish out of water.

86 percent of East students surveyed don’t wear genuine fur.

[These animals] have nerves.

They feel pain. And we’re doing this for a coat––a coat.

-East senior Samantha Wheeler

Fur vest: Rue 21- $30

Beret hat: JC Penney- $13 Fur jacket: Target- $30

Hat: Target- $19.99 Scarf: Kohls- $27 www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 31

lifestyle | photoshoot

White vest: JC Penney- $17 Ear muffs: JC Penney- $12 White boots: Famous Footwear- $49.99 Brown booties: Target$29.99 “People have this image of the way trapping was 150 years ago where people used traps in which the animal was caught in the trap for days,” Paul says. “It doesn’t do me any good to have an animal struggling in my trap. That attracts attention from other people or from another predator that might destroy the fur value of that animal. Trapping has evolved quite a bit now, so people are very aware of how to do it correctly and ethically.”

The issue of wearing or not wearing real fur has become increasingly controversial with the emergence of animal rights groups such as PETA. Real fur has been spotted on Lady Gaga, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and Jennifer Lopez, who has a clothing line which frequently exhibits real fur.

More increasingly, however, is the emergence of celebrities and companies turning to faux fur. Pamela Anderson, Christina Applegate and Snooki all discourage the use of real fur in fashion. In 2005, J. Crew cracked under the pressure of PETA and cut the use of real fur, joining popular faux-bearing clothing stores H&M and Forever 21. In October 2012, all Australian department stores including Target, Big W, Myer and K-Mart banned the selling of real fur, making Australia the first nation to carry out such a policy.

Washington, California, Arizona, Colorado and Massachusetts have also passed laws by voters’ initiative to ban many types of traps.

32 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

However, according to an article by Robert Southwick of the Internet Center for Wildlife Damage Management, a non-profit-grantfunded site that provides research-based information on how to responsibly handle wildlife damage problems, homeowners, farmers and communities in these states have suffered varying degrees of economic loss due to a reduction in animal trapping. These include millions of dollars worth of damage to roads, timber and basements.

“When traditional trapping is essentially eliminated, beaver populations increase significantly, as do complaints, damages and costs associated with control measures,” it states. “The public’s attitude toward beavers becomes negative, causing beavers to be labeled as pests. Wildlife managers want to maintain beavers as a valuable resource with healthy populations that are in line with the human tolerance level.”

Despite the emergence of these issues that result when animals are not properly controlled, groups like PETA and the Animal Liberation Front still put shocking photos and videos on their websites of animals being skinned alive and abused for their fur. Jorney Mink Ranch and Haska Fur Farms declined to comment, but Paul says that he doesn’t agree with the notion that fur and mink farms often abuse their animals.

“If you’re raising a crop or herd of animals, you don’t treat them inhumanely, you treat them healthy because you want a healthy population that you are able to market,” he says. “The wildlife society is the international association of professional wildlife biologists—and they support trapping as a wildlife management tool. That’s something that PETA and other animal rights groups completely ignore. They never want to talk about what the professionals think about trapping.”

To Salyers, on the other hand, faux fur in fashion is not only all about being humane— it is a less expensive and more comfortable option to real fur.

“Faux fur weighs about a third of animal fur, so why not wear something that’s equally warm, considerably lighter, and easier to care for?” she says. “We have customers who maybe have a couple animal furs in their closet that want something similar to what [DSFF] sells, so it appeals to both animal-lovers and also to people who love beautiful things.”

In addition to being more comfortable and affordable, Wheeler says not wearing real fur is worth it to protect an animal’s life. Wheeler says that if she could go back to that Christmas morning, the only thing she’d change is to work even harder to make her grandmother see “what she was a part of.”

“I don’t know how anyone can want to wear an animal,” Wheeler says. “I think more people need to be shown what goes into the making of those coats before they buy it.” SM

How To Wear Faux Fur sidebar rachel hartwick People often associate fur with the typical heavy knee-length coat worn by elderly women. But Donna Salyers at Donna Salyers’ Fabulous Furs (DSFF) says that this is not the case—girls of all ages can flaunt full faux-fur outfits or outfits with a touch of faux fur lining.

“We sell men’s coats, but it’s a small percentage [of our total sales]. Our customers are mostly women,” Salyers says. “I think the cutest little thing is our urbanista jacket. It’s just a fitted jacket with fur lining, and it’s cute as can be. It comes in a coffee brown or black. There are all kinds of cute little jackets for [teenagers].”

From H&M to J. Crew, Fabulous Furs isn’t the only option for faux furs. H&M has a variety of faux fur options ranging from furry tasseled caps to leopard-print faux collars. J. Crew carries items such as a black faux-fur vest with a tie and a warm ivory fox-inspired scarf.

Although fur is most popularly worn during the colder months as outerwear, Salyers says that DSFF carries a number of lightweight options for seasons other than winter.

“If you want [the coat] to be warm, it should probably be full-length, but if you want something lightweight that’s a fashion statement, you choose accordingly,” Salyers says. “We try to make small inexpensive pieces so that you can have something that’s really fashion forward but spend $89 instead of $500.”

According to Salyers, the keys to picking out the perfect faux fur outfit are not only accessorizing, but starting with a person’s hair color, unless someone perfers saphire blue or ruby red fur.

“Often, something that blends with your hair color would be the most flattering,” she says. “A blonde should wear a pale ivory or cream-colored fur, while [someone with brown hair] would look well in something darker.”

Salyers recommends faux fur in fashion over other fabrics.

“Faux fur is so much nicer,” Salyers says. “The touch, the look, the quality of the designs, and the quality of the fabric are what [set faux furs apart.]” SM

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 33

special report | cancer

the fourth step

After being diagnosed with cancer and recovering, East history teacher and basketball coach Wally Vickers was told that his wife, too, had cancer. story claire schomaker photo michael tedesco

W

East basketball coach Wally Vickers has never taken off this bracelet since his wife passed away from cancer.

34 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

ally Vickers is a fighter. You don’t coach 10 seasons of East basketball if you’re not. You don’t win over 115 career games if you’re not. And you don’t survive cancer if you’re not.

You do wear a bracelet. Every day of your life. “Fight it. Cure it.”

The doctors informed Vickers that he had a 70 percent chance of surviving. Yet for the East history teacher and boys’ varsity basketball coach, that was much more than enough.

Vickers was 25 years old and working his first teaching job in Hamilton, Ohio when he noticed a lump in his neck while shaving one December morning before school.

“I remember just thinking, ‘Oh no,’” Vickers says. “I had a bad feeling, so I immediately made an appointment.”

He was diagnosed with stage III nonHodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), meaning that the cancer had spread to lymph nodes throughout his body. According to the American Cancer Society, one in every four men and one in every three women is diagnosed with cancer at some point in their life.

And Vickers became subject to both sides of this statistic.

Twenty years after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Jan Vickers was diagnosed with leukemia.

Four months after Wally and Jan married in 2008, Jan returned from a trip to Florida and mentioned that, while she had been playing tennis, she felt overcome with exhaustion and was forced to walk off the court. They did not realize it at the time, but she had also acquired various unexplained bruises.

One Saturday night in April 2009, Vickers and Jan went out to dinner. Upon returning, they walked up the stairs of their back deck.

When Jan reached the top of the fourth step,

special report | cancer she had to stop and take a break because she was so exhausted.

“I was becoming concerned,” Vickers says.

“When she did that, I said, ‘Go in, get yourself ready. We’re going to Bethesda.’”

Jan’s admission into Bethesda North Hospital was the first step of a long and trying process. Within 24 hours, the doctors were almost positive that Jan had leukemia.

The Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) notes that there are about 27,000 adults diagnosed each year with leukemia.

Vickers said that after Jan was diagnosed, doctors recommended that she immediately begin a very extensive chemotherapy treatment to minimize the cancer as much as possible.

CTCA oncologist Dennis Citrin says that chemotherapy does not stop the leukemia from regenerating in the bone marrow.

Jan would need a bone marrow transplant in order to completely rid her body of cancer.

The transplant was scheduled for April, and the doctors began a search for a compatible match. Her brother turned out to be the one.

“They deemed it a very successful transplant,” Vickers says. “Her brother was as good of a match as there could possibly be.

The early indicators were all good, she came home in late May, and we were very hopeful.”

Two months later towards the end of July, Jan had a scheduled checkup on the milestone of the 100th day following her diagnosis. The checkup brought back good results and the doctors were optimistic.

Everything was looking bright until mid-fall.

In November, Jan ran into some complications.

Doctors ran multiple tests when she went back for a routine appointment and inevitably confirmed the couple’s fear.

Cancer was back.

Jan was offered different options. The first was a repeat of the treatments that she had just gone through, but the doctors were not confident that this method would be successful. The other option was to travel to The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, a facility in Houston, Texas that specializes in treating cancer patients.

Choosing the more promising option, they packed their bags for Houston.

Jan entered the facility and began treatments in January 2010. A relative stayed with her the entire duration of her treatment and Vickers made three separate trips down to MD Anderson so that he could still continue teaching school.

“They were trying a different treatment program,” Vickers says. “Things were going so great. She even came back for a short period of time.”

But it was not long before Jan encountered complications yet again.

“We had to return to Houston and restart treatment, but at that point she wasn’t really even strong enough to do it,” Vickers says.

“They said it wasn’t going to work.”

Each issue of Spark this year will feature a story about the effects of cancer in the community.

Vickers and Jan returned from Houston to spend their last few days together at their home in Mason. It was early April when she entered into hospice.

A week later, on April 21, 2012, Jan Vickers lost her battle with cancer.

Clint Adkins, who has been coaching basketball with Vickers for nine seasons, considers Vickers to be a member of his extended family and a close friend. He believes that basketball helped Vickers cope with losing his wife and is proud of how the team supported their coach.

“In retrospect, it makes you look at how important the game of basketball really is, and

“My chemotherapy treatments were on Mondays and my goal was to be back at work every Tuesday,” Vickers says. “And I was, except for one day when I got to school and realized I forgot my nausea pills. If you don’t take them, you immediately get sick. So I had to leave that day, but being at school on Tuesdays was kind of my deal.”

Along with his motivation and positive mindset, another contributing factor that Vickers believes helped him battle and eventually beat NHL was his young age and physical fitness. At the time that Vickers was diagnosed, he was frequently playing basketball with the Miami University students and knows that being active was beneficial.

“Honestly, I just think I wasn’t ready to pack it in yet,” Vickers says. “The doctor said to me, ‘You have a 70 percent chance to beat this.’

If I’m playing a game and my coach tells me I have a 70 percent chance to win, I’m going to win! That was what I had in the back of my mind. With that 70 percent, there was no way I wouldn’t beat it.”

I found out at a young age that cancer knows no boundaries. As time goes on, no family is excluded from it. It reaches everybody. really, it’s not that important. You look at the situation of Coach Vickers, which was so much more important than what we were doing on the court,” Adkins says. “The players really rallied around Coach. The guys we had were really great, they helped him along.”

Vickers says he is grateful for the compassion he received from the team, friends and family.

Ever since he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma as a young man, Vickers has been forced to deal with the monster of cancer.

According to radiologist Timothy McCay of the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, there are four progressive stages of NHL. “Staging cancer is important to the patient because it helps define what therapies will be offered,” McCay says. “Stage I therapies are significantly different from therapies for stage IV NHL.” McCay notes that stage I is considered local disease and stage IV is considered far advanced disease. Stages II and III are determined byp far the cancer has spread from its initial source.

“Because I was in the beginnings of the third stage, the doctors knew I had had it for a while,” Vickers says. “We figured that I had had NHL for at least two years.”

Within two weeks of the morning that he noticed the lump, Vickers was admitted as a regular patient at Christ Hospital for weekly chemotherapy treatments. The chemo lasted for six months and throughout the entire course, Vickers managed to miss only one day of school outside his goal.

After the chemo treatments finally ended in June, Vickers says that he had a break to rest and regain body strength before starting a program of 30 radiation treatments.

“By the end of the treatments, the doctors felt really confident that they had killed the cancer,” Vickers says. “The program that they put me on was a very aggressive situation and it got it.”

Vickers has been cancer-free ever since.

“I found out at a young age that cancer knows no boundaries,” Vickers says. “As time goes on, no family is excluded from it. It reaches everybody.”

He was amazed at how both of his experiences with cancer have allowed him to enter into a network of other people who have also experienced cancer. Vickers says that when he finds out about other people who have been affected, he reaches out to them.

“There is an unexplainable connection between people who have had to deal with cancer,” Vickers says, “It’s amazing when you go through it and you realize how many people have gone through the same thing.”

Losing his wife has opened Vickers’s eyes to a new perspective on the world and others.

He has worn the leukemia “Fight it. Cure it.” bracelet since the day his wife was diagnosed..

“I appreciate life more,” Vickers says. “As a teacher, it bothers me when people don’t take advantage of their talents and waste days and their lives.”

He twists his bracelet. Fight it. Cure it. SM

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 35

Are you ready for some Presenting Spark’s 2012 Online college bowl coverage: Your guide to 26 college bowl Games.

bowling?

Go Online to:

lakotaeastspark.com Take a look at Spark’s predictions for this year’s college bowl matchups.

Scan to read this year’s bowl guide 36 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

Games to watch UC

v.

Duke

Oregon

v.

Kansas State

Jan. 3, ESPN

Alabama

v.

Notre Dame

Jan. 7, ESPN

Dec. 27, ESPN

the next generation [press start] With the video game industry beginning its transition from the seventh to eighth generation, Spark takes a look forward­­and backward to examine how the industry is changing and what its future holds.

t

he state of the video game industry is confusing.

That is, in 2008, the video game industry reached $22 billion in sales of hardware (consoles and handhelds), software (games) and accessories (controllers, memory expansions, etc.), making it the best year for the industry so far. That same year, the housing market bubble burst, plunging the U.S. economy into a recession that pales only in comparison to the Great Depression.

Now, it’s a different story. Since then, the economy has slowly been improving, but the industry’s total revenue has been constantly decreasing every year, with an eight percent drop from 2008 to 2009.

Last year, the industry hit $9.3 billion, the lowest it’s been since 1999. But how can this be, when the last three games in the “Call of Duty” series have made over $1 billion each and a six-year-old game like Wii Sports sold four million copies last year alone? ***

A Vicious Cycle

The panicked are crying out that the video game industry is heading towards another crash akin to the 1983 incident, during which the thenfledgling market hit a brick wall. Revenue dropped from $3.2 billion that year to $100 million in 1985 and was only saved by the sudden immense popularity of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

But that failure might have been what was supposed to happen.

Like the economy, the gaming industry operates in a cyclical fashion, and in 1983, the second generation of video games was coming to an end. Beginning in 1976 with the first 8-bit home consoles, the generation was choking on too many consoles, with four being released in 1982 alone. This led to over-congestion of games as well, including many lowquality games like the infamous E.T. game adaption, the excess copies of which Atari dumped in a landfill in New Mexico.

The current generation of video games, now the seventh, began in 2005 with the release of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and seven years later, the generation is dying. Wii sales are finally slowing down, and Xbox and PlayStation 3 (PS3) sales are coming to a dead tie for systems sold. Unlike the 1983 incident, overpopulation of consoles isn’t a problem, with the Big Three (Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony) remaining the indisputable champions of the console. Problems with game quality, however, have become more prevalent. This is due in part to the ease in marketing a Wii game to a mother or father just looking for a game their family can play together.

But this might not equate to a crash.

According to Peer Schneider, co-founder and Senior Vice President of Content at IGN Entertainment, the crash of 1983 wouldn’t occur today for a few choice reasons.

“The crash was unique. People stopped playing and talking about video games,” Schneider told Spark. “Hardware sales decreases at the end of console cycles aren’t new. We’ve seen this toward the end of previous generations as well. What’s different this time is that the cycle

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 37

entertainment | next generation was stretched and the time between new console releases was longer than ever.”

Erik Kain, a video game blogger for Forbes, agrees that lack of spending on video games is coming as a direct result of the current consoles’ lifespans, claiming that any consumers who might buy a console either already have one or are waiting for the presumably fastapproaching eighth generation.

“There are more games than ever before,” Kain says. “As the economy recovers, new systems are released and people begin to find more disposable income in their pockets, the video game industry will pick up.”

Schneider firmly believes that the new generation of consoles, beginning with the Nintendo Wii U released on Nov. 18, will help bolster the industry. However, neither Microsoft nor Sony has made any announcements regarding new consoles. There are signs pointing toward the unveiling of a new Xbox in June 2013 at the next Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), an annual convention at which system reveals typically occur, but with Sony reporting $312 million losses, a new PlayStation seems unlikely. And even the Wii U’s main upgrade over its predecessor is high-definition gaming, a feature both the Xbox and PS3 have been boasting for over six years. Stephen Totilo, editor-in-chief for

wiinovation

Kotaku, a gaming website, emphasizes that decreased sales are caused by boredom with current consoles.

“People who can afford electronics that cost more than $99 are tired of the current consoles,” Totilo says. “They’ve been waiting for something new and exciting for awhile.”

Brave New World

Now the question is where the industry will go in the future. Eight years ago, the ostensible direction was into the land of high-definition graphics, but now it’s less obvious. It could have been motion control, if every console wasn’t already utilizing some sort of motion controller (the Wii has been motion control from the beginning, and the PS3 Move and Xbox Kinect were released by Sony and Microsoft, respectively, two years ago). To look forward though, people may need to look back at the past four years.

What they’ll notice are things like Xbox Live’s Summer of Arcade specials, where smaller downloadable games were pushed to the forefront and framed with fireworks and (usually) sterling reviews. They’ll see the rising popularity of Steam, a gaming community for computers on which users can download games directly to their computer and play with other players, and to a lesser extent, the increased use of Electronic Art’s

infographic irfan ibrahim

Nintendo has taken the next step in gaming by introducing the Wii U, which utilizes many features previous consoles (1.

Microsoft Xbox 360, 2. Sony Playstation 3, 3. Nintendo Wii,) have offered. Microsoft is rumored to announce their next console in 2013, and Sony has not made any announcements on a new console release.

HD

NOVEMBER 2005

HD

NOVEMBER 2006

NOVEMBER 2006

NEW FEATURES: Mobile and console gaming are virtually interchangeable, meaning a player can take the WiiU controller away from the TV and continue playing on the 6.2 inch LCD screen.

Dual display on the LCD screen, allowing the player to play the game on the TV and view different game options of the WiiU controller, depending on the game.

Wii December 2012 online gameplay

Forward facing camera.

High Definition

Built-in nine-axis motion sensors

Motion Oriented

38 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

HD

TBA

information theesa.com, nintendo.com grabstats.com, microsoft.com, sony.com

entertainment | next generation

as the economy recovers, new systems are released and people begin to find more disposable income in their pockets, the video game industry will pick up.

Origin, a program akin to Steam. People will see games like “Bastion,” an independent game released through Steam, become one of the most critically-acclaimed and commercially successful games of the year.

Due in part to the advent of internet connectivity between game consoles and computers, mediums through which games can be downloaded have become much more popular, with Steam usually serving no less than 3 million users at any time. In fact, this increased use of downloadable content (raising $7.3 billion in revenue in 2011) has more developers and publishers taking advantage of this.

For example, THQ, a game developer and publisher, is currently operating a Humble Bundle, the 14th in a series of game collections that are sold over the internet. Buyers must pay at least one cent, but other than that, there are no restrictions on what people pay (usually an additional game is offered if a buyer pays more than the average price paid). Users can then assign how much of their money they want to split between charity, the developers of whatever games are included in that bundle and the operators of the Humble Bundle.

Many developers also hope that an increase in downloadable gaming will lead to a decrease in the number of used games consumers purchase.

The used game market, run mostly by stores like GameStop, has drawn the ire of studios for a long time, even attracting the hatred of Jameson Durall, a lead designer for Volition Inc., the studio behind the “Red Faction” and “Saints Row” series.

In a blog post entitled “I Feel Used,” Durall writes, “I think what most consumers don’t realize that every time they buy a used game, there is ZERO money making it back to the Game Developers [sic]. All of those profits are going directly to the re-seller and making it more and more difficult for us to continue making higher quality products.”

Microsoft may reflect these fears, as multiple rumors have hinted at the next generation of their console going as far as to not even play used games. Totilo believes both sides of the used games argument are valid, but that they’ll soon be pointless.

“GameStop would tell you, as they have told investors, that trade-ins encourage more purchases. Publishers and developers will tell you, as they have told investors and fans, that trade-ins don’t make them a dime.

Both arguments have merits,” Totilo told Spark. “But in a world where we download games, used disc game sales aren’t going to be as much of a thing as they are now.”

The transition to a predominantly downloadable industry, however, may not be that easy. One only has to look so far as the PlayStation Portable (PSP) Go, an “upgrade” to Sony’s handheld system, the PSP. Sony reduced the system’s gaming capability to download only, leaving only the PlayStation Store, Sony’s virtual market, to provide games. A major problem with this was the absence of a large number of PSP games that would have normally been available for those buying physical copies. Ultimately, the PSP Go failed to grab consumer attention, lasting less than two years before production was ended as a result of lackluster sales and Sony shifting its focus to replacing it with a better handheld.

Another barrier for the gaming industry is the threat of piracy, which has increased with the popularity of torrent sites like The Pirate Bay.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot told Games Industry International that “it’s about a 93 to 95 percent piracy rate.”

Kain, however, believes it’s less piracy, and more digital rights management (DRM), a technology that, in the case of gaming, controls how many computers a game may be put on, that’s the real threat to gaming.

“While I don’t personally endorse piracy, I think it rarely impacts actual sales,” Kain says. “Overbearing DRM can really hurt sales, which is why so many smaller, private companies are turning their back on DRM. I’ve heard from many people in the industry that they believe the big game publishers are well aware that DRM is futile but are forced to go ahead with it because of shareholder pressure.”

So even though the realm of downloads may seem to be the only logical place for the industry to go, it might not be the most plausible.

According to Kain, it’s a mixed bag.

“I don’t think downloadable content will ‘revitalize’ anything, but it’s a smart way to add content and profits,” Kain says. “But we’re still in the early stages of digital distribution, and I think it will evolve over time and become an important part of the financial equation.” *** In a lot of ways, gaming is lost. There’s no clear direction for future generations other than to continue improving upon graphics. And right now, at the end of another generation of gaming, it’s vital that direction be found. Maybe the industry needs to embrace the encroaching Apple App Store, but there are even hesitations about that, because, as Schneider puts it, “most of the highest-grossing games in the App Store are free-to-play, monetized via in-game commerce.”

There won’t be another crash of 1983, but there also won’t be the same less-flawed transition that occurred from the sixth to seventh generations of gaming. It would be unfair to say gaming is limping away from a swift and cruel death. But it could be likened to a wanderer trudging into a dimly-lit cave with nothing but a box of matches and a Wii U controller. —Dillon Mitchell

power to the

]people] In the past years, independent game developers have become increasingly more commonplace. t was the product of three years, three to ten hours of work a day at his house or any number of coffee shops, meticulous scrutiny and the belief that all his hard work would be worth it. When the game was released, it became the all-time highest-rated Xbox Live Arcade game, the 10th highest rated Xbox game ever made and the recipient of a string of awards from a multitude of groups that range from Best Platformer, Casual Game of the Year and Best Soundtrack. He did this without a budget of $100 million and without a team of certified experts behind him. For all intents and purposes, Jonathon Blow created one of the greatest indie games of all time, alone.

Blow, the creator of “Braid,” an independent game released in 2008,

i

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In addition to the idea of freedom, more developers are deciding to make indie games because of the lack of creativity and variety in major title games. Corey Cole, an independent developer of the critically acclaimed “Quest for Glory” series as well as the new game “Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption” told Spark that triple-A titles also lack value beyond instant gratification.

“It’s sugar versus protein,” Cole says. “The triple-A games are all sugar and adrenaline and they’re not really telling stories. Most games out there don’t have real meaning behind them, especially first-person shooters, which have no reason to be played other than the momentary excitement. Our game immerses you into its own world.”

With new opportunities through digital distribution, a growing audience and a need for creativity now is a better Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption time than ever for developers to take is a game that was funded their interesting and unique ideas and through Kickstarter. develop them into games that are true photo used with fair use to their visions. James Swirsky, codirector of Indie Game: The Movie, a Sundance Film Festival award-winning achieved what most of his peers aspire to reach: critical success with an documentary that follows the development of indie games through the idea that was completely original, interesting and more reflective than lives of their developers, sees the rise in indie games as an indication that something significant is taking place in the industry. other games on the market.

“It does seem like the most exciting things happening in video games “I made ‘Braid’ the way it is because it’s a complex thing where there’s a lot of ideas in it, and depending on what angle you’re taking, it could right now are taking place in independent gaming,” Swirsky told Spark. mean many different things. That’s what I was interested in doing,” “I imagine it’s akin to the vibe that must have been floating around when Blow told Spark. “I didn’t want anything simplistic that encapsulates one something like cinema’s French New Wave or music’s emergence of message, and I don’t feel the more important things in the world are punk rock was happening.”

But even with all modern amenities, the process of making a game made that way.”

But it hasn’t always been as accessible for developers like Blow to still isn’t simple, even if having the passion to make one is.

“It’s not very hard to have ideas, and it’s not very hard to have create and market their unique games because of their competitors.

When most people talk about video games, the “Call of Duty”s and interesting ideas,” Blow says. “The hard part is making it happen and not the “Halo”s of the game industry are the first that come to mind, the giving up on the idea when it turns out to be a lot of work.”

Of all the obstacles in making an indie game, besides the basic skills major studio games that can’t break even unless they sell 25 million copies. But hidden by the big budgets and mass appeal of triple-A games needed to program a game, Blow sees the lack of determination to be (major titles) are thousands of other games that break the monotony of the most widespread among developers.

“People will give up a good idea because they realize it’s so much the big studio game market. These games are identified as independent because of their separation from a major developer and their lack of work to get their original vision that they’ll cut down what they’re doing drastically and maybe the cut-down version isn’t as interesting as it financial support from a video game publisher.

According to Blow, the reason most developers choose to be should have been,” Blow says. “You just have to avoid all that by being independent instead of trying to work for a larger company is based willing to do that work.”

Swirsky agrees that the deciding factor in an indie developer’s success mostly on freedom.

“If you have an idea about what you want to do and you want to build is confidence.

“To push through [the obstacles], you have to believe in yourself that idea, you’re just not allowed to do that with a large company that wants to ensure that they’re going to get their $300 million back,” Blow and your idea wholeheartedly,” Swirksy says. “And any time an artist says. “You can’t do what you want to do. That’s not how it works. You spends that much time on a single idea, things like doubt, fear, anxiety, exhaustion come into play. [The biggest is obstacle is] pushing through do what they want you to do.”

most notable ]indie games] information gamespot.com

40 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

bastion [pc/xbox 360/iOS]

braid [pc/xbox 360/PS3]

entertainment | next generation those feelings and believing in that initial kernel of an idea that started it all.”

Another major obstacle in the development of an indie game is funding. Major titles are usually funded by a publisher or producer giving them budgets in the $25-$100 million range. It’s not easy to get a large amount of money, so most developers turn to online services such as Kickstarter, a popular online pledge system that offers developers a medium where they can pitch their game and connect with supporters who can back their projects through donations.

Since its conception in 2009, it has launched 34.22 percent of game projects put on its site, raising a total of $80.63 million for 1,163 games according to its website. So far, Kickstarter has been successful in bringing together the gaming community of creators and supporters, but its success has given rise to doubt in its ability to maintain its focus on a variety of options. Peer Schneider, Co-founder and Senior Vice President of Content at IGN Entertainment, a major gaming news outlet, sees the foreboding effect of Kickstarter’s success for the smaller developers.

“The emergence of Kickstarter is helping some [indie developers] put their ideas into practice,” Schneider says, “but there are now so many titles vying for funding, it’ll soon be as difficult as before to cut through the clutter to the diamonds in the rough that need the extra help.”

Swirsky disagrees though. He sees Kickstarter as a service that might have some blips but overall is an innovative idea.

“Kickstarter is a beautiful thing,” says Swirsky. “It is a wonderfully, stupid-simple idea of ‘Do you want to see this project happen? Then help me make it.’”

In addition to the growing competition, another problem that Kickstarter has created is the price of using the service and how little of the raised sum the developers get to keep.

Star Command, a Kickstarter project developed by War Balloon Games, raised $37,000 through the website. But after paying $3,000 in expenses to Kickstarter and Amazon Payments, $10,000 to create and send prizes to supporters who donated (a common marketing technique for most projects), $6,000 toward the game’s soundtrack, $4,000 for startup fees and legal representation, and finally an income tax on the remaining $6,000, War Balloon games were left with only $4,000 to make their game. The company’s main expense though was gifting the prizes to supporters.

“We just didn’t fully appreciate the cost of printing 200 posters, shirts, and, more than anything, shipping,” the update from War Balloon Games says. “Shipping is, A, expensive, B, a pain in the ass when you have [poster] tubes and C, time consuming,” The inexperience of the developers is more to blame than Kickstarter itself for the lack of money, but the fact that the money made through the site is not as final as it seems once a great multitude of expenses are paid as well as the variety of ways the money must be spent is something most overlook.

Kickstarter declined an interview on the subject of their site.

Although competition between developers on sites such as Kickstarter are projected to grow, the fact that indie developers are also being given a wider outlet for their games can’t be ignored.

Consoles such as the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and soon the Wii U all have special features for indie games on their online marketplaces.

Games such as “Braid,” “Castle Crashers” and “Limbo” have all found commercial success through console gamers. But as Cole puts it, even

minecraft

journey

[pc/xbox 360]

[PS3]

with $400,000, they’re still working with one percent of the budget of most triple-A titles. This makes it hard for them to compete with other popular games on the consoles with which gamers are already familiar.

“There are expectations,” Cole says. “People are used to playing these games that cost $25-$50 million to develop, and when they see a smaller indie game they want to know why we don’t have these amazing 3-D graphics like ‘Call of Duty’, and the answer is we didn’t spend $25-$50 million on it.”

But through the funding of Kickstarter, a new console, OUYA, has been developed that focuses on the freedom of the indie developers rather than the mass appeal of major studio games. Its open sourced Android platform allows for games to be created on less complicated hardware. This simplicity also allows developers to market their games without having to work through a hierarchy which is partly the problem with big consoles such as Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

“Indie developers need a way to bypass the existing console platform and publisher infrastructure,” OUYA advisor and member of the original Xbox team Ed Fries says. “OUYA could be a game changer.”

kickstarter is a beautiful thing. it is a wonderfully stupid-simple idea of ‘do you want to see this project happen? then help me make it’

Swirsky believes that OUYA is the next frontier for the fast-growing indie market.

“It’s an amazing time to be a creator,” Swirsky says. “More than ever before, independent artists are producing fantastic works and connecting directly with audiences and markets in a way, and on a level, that is very much unprecedented. It really feels like there is a movement afoot. Central to this movement is access. Access to tools and access to markets. OUYA looks to be a great step forward in this vein of thinking.

It is yet another tilt in favour of creators which, by extension, is always an interesting and exciting thing for the audience.”

The idea of being indie is something most are starting to recognize.

Free of attachment to a major entity, the creator is free to do whatever he or she wants.

And while these games compete with multi-million dollar game projects, their creativity and attention to detail accounts for their success.

It’s what makes games like “Minecraft,” an indie game based on simplistic building mechanics created by two men on a budget of next to nothing, able to reach over 8 million people.

But making money and topping titles like “Halo” or “Call of Duty” aren’t what making an indie game is about. Even after Blow received all of his accolades, positive reviews and money from the game sales, the most accomplishing feeling that came from Braid was the fact that he made a game he was proud of. Making indie games, at least to Blow, is about the freedom of expression and unique voice that it gives him.

“I don’t know [why I’m attracted to games] anymore. When I was young, I just liked games in the way that anyone who plays video games and gets excited over them does. But these days it’s not so true anymore.

I don’t like many games that are being made and sold,” Blow says. “I might have said once that it’s about player interactivity and choices and all that, but I don’t really care about that anymore. For me it’s really about pinning down an idea down and exploring it through a game.”—Chris Bowling

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 41

entertainment | next generation

industrial

]revolution] opinion

Spark editor Arvind Madhavan discusses the advantages of independent game development.

Out of all the games that launched last month, two in particular stood out to me: “Call of Duty: Black Ops II” and “Little Inferno.”

I’m sure “Black Ops II” needs no formal introduction, seeing as it’s the yearly “Call of Duty” that everyone has been expecting since the release of its predecessor, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3” last November, but “Little Inferno” might.

“Little Inferno” is an indie game from Tomorrow Corporation, a joint venture between three indie game developers, each with moderate individual success. In the game, the player is seated in front of a Little Inferno Fireplace—the hottest item on the market. Players then take objects from their inventory and burn them in the fireplace. As the object burns, coins and stamps fall out, allowing the player to buy more objects from a catalog. Some objects, when burned with other objects, produce neat combos, which nets the player extra coins and stamps. While this may seem completely unexciting, it’s surprisingly addicting to see little toys slowly burn to ash.

Beneath the seemingly cute and innocent gameplay lies a very grim and surprisingly dystopian story that involves citizens of this fictitious town being trapped by what seems to be an eternal, harsh winter. As the game continues, the character’s neighbor sends small letters at random intervals. These sporadic messages reveal the miseries and woes of the citizens trapped in front of their fireplaces, but also reveal the neighbor’s descent into insanity, eventually climaxing with her wishing to become a part of the inferno. For a light-hearted game about a tiny inferno, the story, which is expertly interwoven into the game, is surprisingly dark.

Compared to the latest “Call of Duty” from publisher ActivisionBlizzard, “Little Inferno” had an almost nonexistent production, yet it still manages to pass “Black Ops 2” by leaps and bounds in terms of storytelling and overall enjoyment. It goes to show that production cost means almost nothing when it comes to making a good game. Yet, that’s almost always the focus.

“Star Wars: The Old Republic,” the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game from Bioware, cost almost $300 million to produce, but most of that money went into advertising and voice acting, which limited the overall potential of a role-playing game that could’ve been filled with choices. Even with its outrageous budget and monthly subscription fee, the game flopped because the budget wasn’t focused on the gameplay or the actual quality of the game. It was instead centered on the marketing push and hiring expensive voice actors, a paradigm that many highprofile games are following. Instead of making a truly excellent game, publishers and developers find it easier to make a mediocre product and

top-selling ]2011 games] information vgchartz.com

waste money on overblown marketing schemes and useless additions, like over-the-top 3-D graphics.

These developers fail to notice that graphics really don’t matter that much to most gamers. The top five games on Steam, the leading digital distribution platform for PC, Mac and Linux-based gaming, are all DirectX 9 games, meaning they use graphics two-generations-old. Even “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” which was considered a graphical masterpiece, only uses DirectX 9. And of the games that do use DirectX 11, few of them make use of any of the advanced features available in the DirectX development suite. Even though almost 50 percent of players on Steam can use DirectX 11, the majority still opt for the DirectX 9 games because instead of focusing solely on the graphics, those games are all based on gameplay.

People are still playing “Team Fortress 2” six years after its release because it has superb gameplay, even for today’s standards.

Indie games like “Cave Story” and “Bastion” manage to do so well with such little budgets, yet a massive studio with thousands of employees can’t seem to make a game that can stand on its own merits instead of an extravagant marketing campaign. Games don’t need million dollar voice actors or over-done orchestral scores that are completely drowned out by the hyper-realistic sound effects; games need solid and innovative gameplay first and foremost.

In that sea of triple-A blockbuster movie-games, it seems much harder to find games that aren’t all about the brown textures and hyper-bloom effects. But those gems exist. They aren’t limited to indie titles either.

Games that retain their replayability ten years from now will always have graphics considered bland, but they’ll still be great games.

Now it’s just a matter of finding them. SM

one for the

]family] The Nintendo Wii and Apple App Store have opened up gaming to more casual players.

a

17-year-old boy sits in his room in front of his TV on a Sunday morning, playing “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2” and finishing a Tombstone frozen pizza from the night before.

On that same morning, nine miles away, kids gradually shuffle into the dimly lit room of a church. They ignore the piles of hula hoops and bouncy balls to their right, making a beeline for the four large flat screen TVs on the left hand wall. Hooked up to each of the TVs is a console, three Nintendo Wiis and one Xbox 360 with a Kinect, which the children all form semicircles around, anxiously waiting for a turn to play.

call of duty: modern warfare 3 [xbox360/ps3]

pokemon black/white [nintendo ds]

With the release of the Nintendo Wii in 2006 and the introduction of Apple’s App Store in 2008, supplemented with the enormous growth of the Internet in the last decade, video games have managed to expand past the confines of the stereotypical teenage boy’s bedroom and can now be found in many conventional places.

This transformation in the gaming community can most clearly be explained by the recent rise in casual gaming, which Sean Duncan, Assistant Professor at Indiana University’s Learning Sciences program, partially credits to the debut of the Nintendo Wii and other interactive game systems.

“Instead of trying to sell games to people who are already playing them, Nintendo decided to sell to people who aren’t playing video games, and we’re seeing that with the Xbox Kinect too,” Duncan says.

“My mother-in-law recently bought a Kinect because she wanted to do exercise stuff with it, and she wasn’t a gamer at all. She had never played a game in her life. That’s a different definition of casual gaming.”

While Sony and Microsoft have recently introduced motion controllers for their consoles, it has been six or seven years since the release of an actual gaming system like the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.

Consequently, this has created a surge in casual gamers, which has somewhat overshadowed the traditional hardcore gaming demographic.

In fact, research firm NPD Group announced in September of this year that video game-industry sales (software, hardware and accessories) have dropped 24 percent and $848.3 million since September 2011, a hard hit for the hardcore gaming industry.

Additionally, Duncan says that the number of talks regarding smart phones and other sources of casual gaming at the recent Game Developers Conference, where professional game developers meet annually to share ideas, has shot up significantly.

Although he agrees that playing of casual games has increased, Duncan says that the labels “hardcore” and “casual” are not real indicators of how the games are played. Just as any “Call of Duty” game can be picked up and played in a casual way, people can play “casual” games just as compulsively as “hardcore” ones. In California, 56-year-old Mike Leyde dedicated 2,205 hours to beating “Bejeweled 2,” a game that many people previously thought was unbeatable.

And according to Duncan, game companies have realized that no game appeals to just one type of gamer. They’ve started to adapt by layering their games to be played in either a hardcore or casual way for increasingly diverse audiences.

“PopCap makes games like “Bejeweled” and “Plants vs. Zombies” that you can play really obsessively and really get into them. Nobody would really ever call those hardcore games. They’re still casual games, but sometime they try to cater a little bit to that,” Duncan says. “I would also argue that hardcore games are trying to cater to casual gamers. For example, every “Call of Duty” is basically the same game, and that’s a casual gaming thing because casual games are easy to pick up and use.”

Adding to this, the Nielsen Ratings 2011 App Download Report states that games dominate the majority of the 425,000+ apps available for Apple products, largely contributing to the 15 million downloads from the App Store and, according to a 2011 Apple Press Release, resulting in revolutionary growth within only three years.

Sergei Shevlyagin, Director of Technical Product Management for Duo Games and producer of iPad games such as “Duo Pinball,” says that the growth in casual gaming has certainly been beneficial. “[The increase in popularity for casual gaming is] positive for the

kinect adventures [xbox 360]

just dance 3 [nintendo wii]

Children play the Wii and Xbox Kinect at Vineyard Community Church.

photo michael tedesco

industry—there are more people than ever interested in gaming as a form of entertainment,” Shevlyagin says. “I wouldn’t categorize it as a shift. There are still people interested in hardcore gaming and even more people interested in casual gaming.”

Shevlyagin also says that the expansion of casual gaming has affected the games and apps that Duo Games has been producing, and that regardless, the growth of casual games isn’t digging into the market for hardcore games. “[The increase] has given us the opportunity to create a variety of gaming accessories and corresponding apps,” says Shevlyagin. “[Hardcore and casual gaming] will continue to co-exist and the game genres have a lot to teach each other.”

And so far, this has proven to be true. Despite previous stereotypes, video games are being played in more unexpected places. For the children at Vineyard Community Church, that place happens to be their Sunday morning worship service.

“At [Vineyard Community Church], we want to make everyone feel accepted, loved and valued. For that reason we have coffee for the adults so they can hang out and meet new people, but obviously that’s not going to appeal to children,” Vineyard Community Church family pastor Karen Stefacek says. “Video games are one of the relational types of activities [we offer] so that kids can feel comfortable and help them meet and make new friends.”

After Stefacek pursued her idea, Vineyard Community Church

mario kart wii [nintendo wii]

entertainment | next generation began offering video games for students grades two through five to play before the service started. The games were made available to the kids in hopes that they would want to arrive a little early and look forward to coming to church every Sunday.

“Before, we didn’t have TVs, we just had computer stands to play the games on, but about three or four years ago, we put flat screen TVs on the wall and my elementary pastor figured out which [games and systems] to use,” Stefacek says. “We definitely wanted the interactive, relational piece [that video games provide], and we want them to be able to play together and build relationships before the worship service.”

East junior Josh Oursler also finds video games as a way to bring friends together. However, his approach to the mentality of gaming differs greatly from that of Vineyard Community Church.

On his bedroom desk sits a tall stack of games, including his favorites, “Grand Theft Auto,” “Red Dead Redemption” and “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.” Next to that is his dresser, which holds up his 32 inch TV and in front of that, his PS3. A rolling desk chair becomes his seat for the next few hours.

“It overwhelms my entire life,” Oursler says. “Whenever I’m not at work, I’m playing video games. When I’m with my friends, I’m playing video games. My mind is almost always totally set on video games.”

Oursler’s family bought the Nintendo Entertainment System before he was born and he recalls this to be the first system he had ever played when he was four years old. Since then, Oursler has acquired multiple game systems including a Playstation 3 (PS3), Playstation 2, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS and an Xbox 360, which have become the focal points of his daily life.

“Every day, after I come home from school, I play [video games] for about four hours until about six or seven,” Oursler says. “Then I’ll make an oven pizza for dinner and continue playing [video games] until about two in the morning.”

Whenever I’m not at work, I’m playing video games.

When I’m with my friends, I’m playing video games.

My mind is almost always totally set on video games

Dedicating 20 hours a week to playing video games, Oursler admits that his parents think his addiction is unhealthy, and that it often cuts into his basic needs and responsibilities.

“If I start to get hungry, I’ll eat but on weekends and in the summer, I don’t eat on a regular schedule. My time is pretty much completely split between work, video games and friends, and the ‘friends’ [time] usually turns into [playing] video games,” Oursler says.

Although Oursler is mainly into hardcore games, he says that he owns a few casual games, including “Skate 3” for his PS3 as well as “Nintendogs” and various “Mario” games for his Nintendo DS. Oursler also says that he enjoys playing some iPhone games, but makes sure to add that he “hates ‘Angry Birds.’”

But regardless of what hardcore gamers such as Oursler believe about casual games, they are becoming more integral to the gaming community.

However, Duncan says that both hardcore and casual gaming will remain prevalent––that one kind of gaming hasn’t overtaken the other, but rather that the casual gaming world has expanded.

44 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

“There are a variety of people who get into games for a variety of reasons, and I think once you look into why they get into games and the different ways of playing them, then you start to realize that there are different types of gamers,” Duncan says. “The stereotype [used to be] that a gamer was the teenage boy sitting in his parents’ basement, but that’s obviously not the case anymore.”—Morgan Bain

fixing the

]gap]

Game developers have been working on nullifying gender roles in video games, with some success.

e

veryone would like to think that society is constantly moving forward, but that’s not always the case. Over the years, video games have become more popular because of the improvement in user interface and graphics. However, it is widely known that the characters in these video games exaggerate gender roles, which to some is a setback and to others just another way to make sales.

Developers like Crystal Dynamic and Epic are trying to battle gender roles in video games by reducing the breast size of Lara Croft in the upcoming “Tomb Raider,” or making a playable female character in “Gears of War 3,” a game known for exaggerated masculine characters and excessive violence. But other than a few examples, feminine and masculine characters are still being exaggerated.

“Besides Lara Croft’s slight change in physique, most women in games are sexualized and over exaggerated,” Vanessa Bentley, a Graduate Assistant in Philosophy and Graduate Student in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, says. “And [masculine characters] are equally as exaggerated, but in different ways.”

According to Paul Tassi, a video game-focused writer and editor for forbes.com, as well as the editor-in-chief of a film/tv/gaming site, unreality.com, female characters in games tend to be overly sexualized, while male characters are typically extremely muscular.

“I think [men] are equally exaggerated in most games. The issue becomes that the assets that are exaggerated on women, like breasts and butts, are inherently sexual, whereas muscles like biceps, pecs or abs on men aren’t always thought of as specifically sexual parts of human anatomy,” Tassi says. “That said, the problem becomes if any attractive, in-shape female is in a game, she can be accused of using sex to sell the game. But no one is decrying ‘Devil May Cry’s’ Dante, ‘Dragon Age’s’ Anders or ‘Soul Calibur’s’ Kilik for being too sexy for a game, even if some women may view them as such.”

According to Bentley, these exaggerated stereotypes can change the psychology of the player, as he or she tries to take on the role that his or her character has in the game.

“Games pressure real life and fantasy to meet societal standards,” Bentley says. “After playing video games for some time, men may feel inadequate to the masculine characters because of their exaggerated muscles and tendencies towards violence, while women may feel

entertainment | next generation

level by level Gaming has seen a dramatic change in demographics over the past decade, and this issue, the Spark explains how video gaming has evolved, both demographically and technologically.

infographic irfan ibrahim

The average gamer is:

30

47%

years old

Female

12 years

142

spent playing video games

hours spent playing video games in 2012.

AGE DISTRIBUTION 37%

Wii

<18 18-35 >36

97,000,000

PS3 XBOX 360

70,200,000 70,000,000

Despite having the highest sold console, Nintendoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wii has experienced a lack of sales in the past year, with a sale increase of only .6% in 2012.

UNITED STATES OF gaming of US households have a dedicated game console.

35 percent of East students surveyed play video games for one to five hours a week.

4 7 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 spent

CONSOLE SALE HIGHSCOREs

More people are gaming more than ever, with 25% of players are over the age of 50, largely due to a recent decrease in the price of consoles and games.

49%

Male

$2

CO-OP OR NOT

!

62%

65 percent of consoles are located in the living room; Nintendo Wii leads (75 percent) but Kinect for Microsoft Xbox 360 is helping to shift that platform toward communal spaces.

of gamers play together both locally and online

one or two player? 1 2

78% of gamers who play with others do so at least one hour per week, while 33% of gamers play social games such as Club Penguin and Playstation Network.

information theesa.com, nintendo.com grabstats.com, microsoft.com, sony.com

31%

53%

top video game publishers of 2011 Microsoft

Microsoft Studios was founded in 2011, with twenty five studios worldwide, 20 for games development and five for entertainment technology advancement and publishing.

Nintendo Founded in Japan in 1993, Nintendo is the largest video game company based on revenue.

SONY

Owner of 277 different game franchises, the publisher jumped from seventh to third from 2011 to 2012.

The third largest gaming company, Electronic Arts for the popular Madden NFL series,FIFA and other reuputable sports titles.

Tomb Raider, Hitman, Deux Ex Machinima are just some of the titles Square Enix, best known for the Final Finasty series.

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 45

entertainment | next generation dependent on men because of the soft-spoken and unprotected natures that many feminine characters exhibit.”

Tassi, however, disagrees.

“There isn’t really a self-image factor there most of the time with guys wishing they were built like a semi-truck,” Tassi says. “But a woman might look at a sexualized female character game and either feel disdain for the person who made her or the men who drool over her or just laugh at how ridiculous she looks. Some women, however, might feel empowered by certain strong, sexy female characters in games if they’re designed well and more fully fleshed-out.”

A study conducted in 2009 by Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz and Dana Mastro suggests exactly that. They concluded that when playing as a sexualized female character, both men and women had less favorable attitudes towards women in general than when they played a game without a female character, or no game at all. No known experiments or

games could on men with females find that seldom

be sold based characteristics attractive, but happens.

studies have been conducted to test the psychological effects on men and women who play as an exaggerated masculine character. Despite these findings, games are still being produced that sexualize female characters, due to the marketability.

In September, many fans of “Dead or Alive,” a fighting series known for its large-breasted females, requested that the female characters in “Dead or Alive 5” have even bigger breasts. The Team Ninja director, Yohei Shimbori, said of the requests, “If you have a solid fighting game system there, there’s nothing wrong with having beautiful characters as a layer on top of that––that’s another layer of entertainment that there’s a need for.”

Tassi agrees that having attractive characters isn’t negative, but there should be a balance.

“Using sex to sell a game isn’t inherently bad, but it could be less one-sided,” Tassi says about the influence society has on video games.

“Games could be sold based on men with characteristics females find attractive, but that seldom happens.”

However, women gamers are starting to speak out against the exaggerated sexuality that are in many video games by creating organizations that advocate women gamers and women designers.

Gaming Angels, All Girls Gaming clan and Geek Girls are a few female gamer advocacy groups Luke Crane, a designer of science fiction role-playing games, started a trend on Twitter called “#1reasonwhy.” Women who are involved in the gaming community began using this hashtag to express their discontent

XBOX 360

38%

21% male

9% female

with the treatment of ladies in the video game world.

Although women are being sexualized in many video games, they represent one of the largest demographics for the industry. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) concluded that as of 2011, women ages 18 and up represent 30 percent of the game-playing population while boys age 17 and younger represent 18 percent, according to the 2012 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry, which outlines the sales, demographics and usage data within the computer and video game corporation. The ESA also concluded that 47 percent of all gamers are women, and women over the age of 18 are one of the industry’s fastest-growing demographics.

Despite the increasing female demographic, gender roles in video games still haven’t changed in the past two decades, according to Bentley.

In 1982, a game called “Custer’s Revenge” was released by Mystique for the Atari 2600. The goal of the game is to dodge arrows and obstacles and ultimately reach the naked Native American woman, who is tied to a pole, and have sex with her. Comparatively, in the “God of War” series, Kratos, the extremely angry and violent male protagonist, has sex with at least one female at a time in every game. Unlike in “Custer’s Revenge,” the “God of War” series demonstrates no speculations on these women being raped. However, they are still mere objects of sexual desire, and serve no other purpose than to be “bucksome babes,” or women who are scantily clad, big breasted and serve no other purpose than to attract sexual attention.

These “bucksome babes” are one of three categories that feminine characters can be placed in, proposed in 2009 by Nina B. Huntemann, an Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism from Suffolk University. Another category is the “damsel in distress,” with characters such as Princess Peach, who relies on a male protagonist to rescue her from danger. The third is the “femme fatality” which focuses on female characters who are in fighting games, such as “Mortal Kombat.” In these fighting games, the men typically don’t have sexualized death blows, but the women do, for example, in “Street Fighter,” a kiss of death is used by a female character to kill people.

According to Bentley, almost all female characters are able to fit into one of these three categories, but there is an exception.

“Lara Croft defied those categories, but was still created for a man’s gaze,” Bentley says. “However, her sexuality isn’t where she gets her power. She’s resourceful on her own, educated, and trained.”

And in the upcoming “Tomb Raider” game, Ron Rosenburg, the Executive Producer of Crystal Dynamic’s new Lara Croft reboot, describes the younger Croft as a character that is developing into the woman she will become in the other “Tomb Raider” games. Her body is much less curvy, and her clothes are much less revealing. Although the producers abolished the sexualized Lara Croft, there is still an element of sexism in the new game.

“You’ll want to protect [Lara],” Rosenburg told Kotaku, a gaming news website. “The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualized version of yesteryear. She literally goes from zero to hero. We’re sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again.”

These statements made about the new Lara Croft have caused some criticisms among fans of “Tomb Raider,” especially when the premise for a rape-scene was suggested.

“Rape is a serious topic and shouldn’t just be thrown in to stir things up,” Bentley says. “[Developers of “Tomb Raider”] needed to be much

PS3

male

11% female

Wii

41% male

80% female

information theesa.com, nintendo.com, grabstats.com, microsoft.com, sony.com

46 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

entertainment | next generation more careful with that subject material.”

Despite these major setbacks, Bentely thinks that the abolishment of the once sexualized Lara Croft is helping video games begin to stray away from gender roles.

However, according to Tassi, there’s nothing wrong with having sexy female characters.

“The idea that there’s something wrong with a female character being sexy is misguided,” Tassi says. “But when that is her only attribute, then it becomes a problem.”—Amanda Weisbrod

the processes that lead to their development are artistic. Corey Cole, independent developer of “Hero U: Rogue to Redemption,” believes that video games are art because they are built with features that may be considered artistic.

“Video games have a lot of story and a lot of continuity,” Cole says.

“There are a lot of games that really have just as much story as any novel.

Games are art. There’s no question.”

“Hero U” is a role-playing adventure game, where the player controls a single protagonist, who is immersed in a vast world. It’s fundamentally different than a larger game like “Assassin’s Creed 3” because it is restricted by its 2D graphical presentation, which causes it to chiefly entertain through features like story and music.

While he believes that games are a form of art, he does not consider all games to be “good art.” Cole says that features like music and story can be combined to make a good game and that this is akin to more accepted art forms.

“A movie if you take away the music or the visuals is missing an awful lot,” Cole says. “It’s the bits and pieces put together, the unified whole of a game that determines whether it has artistic merit. There are some movies that are just pure action without making any sense whatsoever but even those have some story, like the Die Hard films. There’s a story Arguments over whether or not a going through that but you know it’s the whole of the parts that makes it.” video game can be art have been Charles Woodman, a professor of electronic design at University of brewing the past few years.

Cincinnati, sees games differently. He believes that any beauty found in games comes from the way gamers make decisions and interact within the environment presented. In interpreting electronic design, attention is paid to how understandable and communicable the design is. ecause video games are a relatively new “From an actual point of view, we look at whether it works and medium, there aren’t so many universally whether it conveys the kind of meaning that it wants,” Woodman says. known classics. There aren’t any prominent “It needs to be expressive.” art or cultural scholars who have attempted Woodman is involved in the development of interfaces. He believes to interpret the meaning of Super Mario that the driving point of games is their interactivity which combines World. But the industry has evolved programing and interface with the player and his or her choices. dramatically since its beginnings in the early “I’m interested in the way that we interact in games,” Woodman says.

1970’s. People played “Pong” because it was “A good game to me is one that should provide a truly unique experience fun. There wasn’t much to expect from a melding the user with the technology that is being used.” game comprised of two players using virtual But, according to Woodman, the unique characteristics of some paddles to knock a dot back and forth. So games do not necessarily make them artistic. He believes that while one consequently, players didn’t expect much, and they enjoyed every minute can try to put games in that category, there is no definite need to do that. of it. But that was forty years ago. When people buy games now, they He argues that games give players a unique experience and that people know exactly what they’re looking for. A person may choose to buy a don’t have to associate this experience with art to enjoy it.

“Call of Duty” game because of online competition, “Flower” because “Plenty of people are good at basketball,” Woodman says. “But none of the relaxing gameplay it provides or “Just Dance 4” because he or she of them are arguing that basketball is an art form. Because it simply does just wants to dance for the fourth time. not have to be one.”

So as technology advances, a broader spectrum of choices is available Jonathon Blow, creator of the critically acclaimed indie game “Braid,” for consumers. This large diversity in games has led to the development believes that any argument over whether or not video games should be of exemplary ones, which have convinced some that games and considered art is pointless. “Braid” is a platform and puzzle video game that was released in 2008. Revered for its apparent artistic merit, it explored time manipulation and was noted for its gradual development of its protagonist.

“Flower” is a downloadable game Blow contends that the argument of whether video frequently argued to be “art.” games should be considered art or not is a fruitless one because the reason that arguments persist is that people simply have different personal definitions of the word “art.”

“Some person might think that art means a wellrespected thing that’s hanging in a gallery and that’s better than everything else,” Blow says. “And somebody else thinks that art means a heartfelt personal expression and somebody else maybe thinks that it could be something made with a lot of skill and it could be commercial too and whatever.”

But there are still some who do take sides, most notably Roger Ebert, a respected film and cultural critc from the

the great

]debate]

b

photo used with fair use

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 47

entertainment | next generation

“Braid” is an extremely popular indie game released in 2008.

photo used with fair use

Chicago Sun-Times. Over multiple blog posts, Roger expressed his view that a video game as a work can never be called art because the object of games is to win and a game could never substitute for a more accepted form of art, like music or literature.

But Blow doesn’t care about this and he is still deeply invested in games regardless of what the argument may be. He says that he enjoys what he’s doing and that what it is really about for him is finding an idea and then focusing on it to make something unique. For him, the argument isn’t anything that should be dwelled upon so heavily because in the end it means nothing.

“It’s not interesting to talk about whether a game is art or not,” Blow says. “Even if you have a ferocious argument about that and win, you just had an argument about a semantic term.”—Onur Eroglu

east in the

] field] East alumnus Ken Kozan focused on art and computer science in school and now works at Nintendo.

a

fter eight long hours of classes, Lakota East alumnus Kenneth Kozan sinks into his desk chair only to put in another four to six hours of homework and personal projects, his only defense against sleep being coffee.

He works non-stop, always running on less than four hours of sleep with the occasional all-nighter before a deadline.

He works as an Environment

48 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

Artist for Retro Studios, part of Nintendo, creating environments for various video games. And he previously worked at a studio called Junction Point, where he worked on “Epic Mickey 2.” So it goes without saying that it’s taken a lot of hard work and perseverance not only in college, but also throughout his high school career, to make it to where he is now.

“I planned accordingly so during high school, I took a lot of computer science, and I took a lot of art, because it interested me,” Kozan says. “And basically, I was smart about which classes I took in college, because I wanted them to have relevance.”

Kozan took Computer Science I and ll, as well as AP Computer Science, all of which are taught by David McKain, and later graduated from Full Sail University, a major entertainment media school, as both the Valedictorian and the Advanced Achiever (voted most likely to succeed by students and faculty), immediately pushing himself into the world of game development.

“He had a very interesting mix of talents in that he was a very good artist, but he was also very good at the software side of programming,” McKain says.

And that mix of talents is what benefitted him in school and outside of school, according to McKain. While many of his students are interested in the gaming industry, he notices that neither the actual amount of work that goes into developing a game nor the amount of programming or software knowledge that is needed resonates with some of those students.

“They find out how difficult it is and how involved it is, and I think very few of them actually end up in that area,” McKain says.

He says that although his classes don’t always focus on the programming, they do work on one gaming project that gives them a sense of what it’s like to be responsible for one piece of a larger project as well as bringing everyone’s pieces together. This necessity to cooperate with co-workers is, for Kozan, one of the hardest parts of his job given that he is always learning to work with new people and new personalities.

“The art is always big-picture-type stuff, and it’s fairly easy to get caught up in it,” Kozan says. “but in the end, you’re part of a big group of people.”

He works with a team of other game artists who, in turn, work with game designers and programmers to create video games. Although each of those vocations are completely separate from each other, they are necessary to create an entire game. A game artist makes the visuals, which means he or she “creates an asset and then puts it into the engine that runs the game.”

And designers decide what goes where with a vague idea of what those visuals will look like, while programmers build the framework of

East alumnus Ken Kozan created this environmental design.

photo used with permission from ken kozan.

on the battle

]lines]

High school students and college students alike have played video games competitively.

THE COST OF AMBITION As “crowdfunding” is becoming popular, many companies are competing to grab a slice of the project funding market. infographic jack mangold

• •

Over $350 million pledged since launch in April 2009 Over 30,000 creative projects

• Over 100,000 funding campaigns hosted since 2008 • Partnered with the president’s Startup America program to encourage startup business growth

• Launchpad feature: Contests held, with the winning submission getting a special opportunity or exposure for their work

• Gaming community, does not crowdfund projects, only chooses finished games made by independent developers • Users vote to pick which indie games are sold on Steam • $100 flat fee cuts down on fake submissions and jokes

All In Funding

b

$100 Flat Fee

$1 Million >40% Project Success Rate

Crowdfunding Fee

5 4

ALL IN FUNDING

91

Processing Fee

9 rady Botner didn’t play video games competitively for even half a year. His team, GrizzinonLarries, consisted of himself, two people from New York named Junior and Richie and another guy from California named Mark. At one point they ranked among the top 100 teams out of the hundreds of thousands of teams in Gamebattles (GB), an organization that helps gamers find competitive matches run by Major League Gaming (MLG), the e-sports equivalent of the NFL or NBA. The team lasted just long enough to get a record seven-win streak, to overtake another “Call of Duty” GB team that previously held a 16-0 record and for Botner to get a free controller as part of a sponsorship deal from Unique Customs, a company that modifies game controllers.

But after five months, GrizzinonLarries split, and none of them have gone back to competitive gaming since. There was no drama, no inner-team jealousy, not even petty bickering. After five months of the most successful competitive gaming of their lives, GrizzinonLarries just stopped.

That isn’t to say that their disbanding came without reason. To

Flexible Funding

Project Funding

4

62

25

FLEXIBLE FUNDING

Unfunded

5

information www.kickstarter.com, www.indiegogo.com, www.rockethub.com, steamcommunity.com

the game, such as how it will play and what buttons will make what part move.

“Gameplay in itself is very important and should be separate because it should play well before it looks good,” Kozan says.

But he also says that game programmers are often the only professionals in the game-development industry that people are aware of, so consequently, the work of game designers and artists is undervalued.

“Because it’s on the computer, people assume that you press a button and things just happen. That couldn’t be farther from the truth,” Kozan says. “The more people spend time on the computer making art, I realized it doesn’t change. Digital and computers are just a medium. It’s the same skills, the same principals, just in a different medium.”

For Kozan, growing up with a Super Nintendo Entertainment System did more than just allow him to play video games. He wanted to be a part of it. And ever since making the decision to be a game artist, he has put all that he has into reaching his goal.

“I just want to be a part of something big. I don’t really care to own a studio and that type of stuff,” Kozan says. “I grew up playing these games, and I’m happy I get to work on them.”

From eight-hour classes at Full Sail, to mandatory 12-hour work days, to just below 11-hour work days, Ken never stops. But his work ethic has gotten him to where he wants to be, something not everyone can say.

“I don’t sit around and play games all day,” Kozan says. “I get to play the game and test it, but it could not be farther from the truth to say that I go to work and play all day. I can’t stress enough how much hard work this is.”—Hannah Eads

Notable Crowd Funded Video Games OUYA Video Game Console $8.6 million raised Project Eternity $3.9 million raised

Planetary Annihilation

Double Fine Adventure $2.9 million raised Wasteland 2 $2.9 million raised

Double Fine Adventure

OUYA Game Console

Planetary Annihilation $1.2 million raised www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 49

entertainment | next generation

Brady Botner played video games competitively for five months before stopping. photo ellen fleetwood

Botner, now an East junior, the end had been a long time coming, an accumulation of all the worst parts of competitive gaming, the topper of which was the amount of time he was required to spend on video games, something which he used to do only for enjoyment.

As he got more heavily into competitive gaming, Botner found himself playing not for the excitement or entertainment value of video games, but because of the constant pressure to stay at the top. For him, it became a job. “[I would play] daily, about 40 to 50 hours a week,” Botner says.

“Near the end, right before I quit, it started getting stressful—the pressure to stay good, and having to play a lot to stay good.”

The pressure Botner felt wasn’t abnormal. The combination of high stakes, high competition and high stress in almost every GB match was enough to make even the best players fling controllers and insults across the room.

Even non-competitive players started to feel the pressure. East junior Ben Call never played competitively, but he did have a reputation

to uphold—namely, his high kill/death ratio (KDR) in “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.”

Call’s KDR was about 2.07, while the mark of a “good” player was around 1, meaning a player typically broke even, getting about one kill for every death. But for Call, this came with unwanted consequences.

“I would find myself not wanting to play because I knew that, if I was going to have to play, I would have to try really hard,” Call says. “It wasn’t fun anymore. I didn’t want to play with friends, because that would make me worse. I didn’t want to talk to people [while playing].

“I would have to tell myself, don’t try as hard. I would get really mad.

[At that point], you can’t play just for fun. You have to play to be good.”

But while the pressures and stresses of competitive gaming are common, they aren’t universal. Some players have found that they are able to ignore the stress, if they feel it at all. Players like Richard Wu, a junior at Mason High School, are able to play past the pressure.

“I haven’t experienced the same stress [as other competitive players],” Wu says. “I believe that the people who will be most successful will be the ones who will work through unpleasant times. For me playing competitively comes naturally and doesn’t inhibit any fun that can be had.”

That isn’t to say that Wu doesn’t get upset when he performs poorly.

He gets fired up when he plays and gets invested in the game, but Wu says that he doesn’t let that stress overtake his better judgment.

“Many times people who rage at games are the ones who either don’t think through the situation logically or are upset that they don’t have control,” Wu says. “I believe that most people would think that there is less stress. But depending on a player’s perspective I believe that it can rival the stress from physical sports.”

And while he doesn’t rack up as many hours as Botner did during his competitive days, Wu still plays a decent amount—about an hour or two daily, more on the weekends. Even more if his friends all get their computers together to host a “LAN party” where they connect to local network to play together, or if he’s out on the occasional gaming binge.

It’s enough to convince his parents that his gaming is a problem, and they’ve recently started trying to limit the amount of time he gets to play by taking away his consoles and computer or shutting off his internet.

But that seems to be a theme in competitive gaming: parents, especially those who don’t see video games as a good use of time in the first place, are usually against their kid gamers going pro, and if not against, at least disapproving.

That was the way to describe Jeffrey Lin’s parents. When Lin, now a freshman studying computer science at The Ohio State University (OSU), started playing “Halo” competitively, he was required to play three to five hours a day and three days a week with his clan, Outcast Reborn. That was in addition to his own personal practices that lasted between two to three hours every week. Before that, he had to play with the clan for a month in order to prove that he was active enough to participate in big-team (8 on 8) matches.

“My parents didn’t really like it, but they still let me do it as long as my grades didn’t suffer,” Lin says. “They didn’t think it was a problem, but they would rather I work on school instead of playing the game so competitively.”

He started by playing “Runescape,” a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game, semi-competitively with a clan of about 100 other members to play in some player vs. player arenas. Eventually, one of his

top reasons people buy video games

word of mouth 50 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

quality of game graphics

a sequel to a favorite game

storyline

entertainment | next generation

they didn’t think it was a problem, but they would rather I work on school work instead of playing a game so competitively.

clanmates invited him to try out for Outcast Reborn, and after about a year, he started to take his game to the next level.

Even at OSU, he still manages to find time to game. He’s currently playing “League of Legends,” a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena, and “Call of Duty.”

He hasn’t played any Halo games in a while because he hated the multiplayer in Halo: Reach so much, but now he’s trying to get back into it for Halo 4. He admits that he still has a long way to go to get back to his former level of play, though.

Wu plays, among other games, various “Call of Duty”s as well as “League of Legends” and “Counter-Strike,” all on the PC. He follows the professional circuit via MLG, the IGN Pro League (IPL) and the Intel Extreme Masters (IEM).

Gaming, to Wu, is just like any other sport: once somebody gets good enough at it, he says, they should be able to make money off it. Wu says that, given the right circumstances, he would seriously consider a career in professional gaming, if the opportunity arose.

And it’s not hard to see why pro gaming is appealing, when there are people like Tom “Tsquared” Taylor, a professional “Halo” player who captained the second most successful team in MLG history and who, in

2006, signed a $250,000 contract with MLG. That was along with all the prize money he made from playing in gaming tournaments and offering competitive video game lessons, sometimes at up to $115 per hour.

Wu says that he sees these pro gamers just like any other kid would see a pro athlete. Where some people might see Kobe Bryant, he sees Dave “Walshy” Walsh, one of the best professional “Halo” players in the world. To Wu, the only difference is that professional gaming hasn’t yet had the time to be put through trials and testing.

And even though he’s in the middle of pursuing a college diploma, Lin still hopes that one day he can turn pro. To him, college is a safety net­—something to make sure that he’ll still be able to make a living if the whole pro gaming thing doesn’t pan out.

“I have watched some professional gamers in ‘League of Legends,’ and I do hope to be able to do it after college if I’m good enough,” Lin says. “Even though it’s a legitimate career, I think it’s important to finish college first to have something to fall back on if the game doesn’t last long enough to make a living.”

But to gamers like Botner, even though he started gaming competitively by watching pros on YouTube, these people are still those teenagers sitting in their rooms, pouring hours upon hours into a game. “[Professional gamers are] mostly people who never grew up,” Botner says. “I never really aspired to be like that. I thought it would be cool to eventually make money, but I didn’t want to put more effort than I already was into it.”

But when it comes down to it, Botner, Wu and Lin aren’t all that different. Just because Botner had a falling out with competitive gaming, doesn’t mean that he no longer appreciates them—after all, he still plays “Call of Duty,” “Gears of War” and now even a little “Minecraft.”

Gaming for them isn’t just a hobby or a phase. Gaming is a community, a place where like-minded people can come together and share their love for a sport, an almost-sport or just a game.—Josh Shi

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entertainment | movie reviews

photo used with permission from mctcampus

Movie Reviews

EDITOR’S

choice by irfan ibrahim

The Life of Pi 20th Century Fox 127 Minutes ∙ PG

T

hank god for Indian movies that aren’t from Bollywood. The Namesake and Jai Ho are remarkable films that utilize well-written scripts, an absence of annoying serenade scenes in the mountains and a representation of Indian culture in a way a global audience can appreciate and understand.

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And it’s all thanks to Irrfan Khan, who starred in both aforementioned films.

The film begins with Piscine ‘Pi’ Patel (Khan), who lives in Canada and is approached by a writer who wants to write about his life and his journey with Richard Parker, a tiger from his father’s zoo. Pi has lunch with the writer and narrates the entire story.

A

s a young boy growing up in India, Patel is misunderstood.

He is named after a famous public pool in France, but explaining that to his classmates doesn’t stop the frequent ‘pissing’s he receives every time morning class attendance is taken. However, he discovers that through the numerical value of pi, he could be known as the one student who could write a great portion of the irrational number on a chalkboard.

Not only was his name technically irrational, but some

may say his faith was as well. Pi had adopted all religions as his own, including Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. He had also believed that animals had inner souls, which he tested when he held out a piece of meat to Richard Parker from his father’s zoo.

When his family moves with their zoo animals to the U.S. in search of a better life, a teenage Pi (Suraj Sharma) expresses grief about leaving his home. The boat the family hitches a ride on tragically sinks in a storm, leaving Pi alone at sea with a handful of animals, including Richard Parker.

The rest of the story discusses how he survived out in the ocean with a Bengal tiger, and how he found God and the will to survive.

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o clarify, I didn’t read Yan Martel’s award-winning book, Life of Pi, and I was unaware that Oscar award-winning director Ang Lee would be directing the film adaption. I saw the film because

Suraj Sharma stars as a teenage Pi alongside this regal tiger.

of Khan’s portrayal of the older Pi, which was the film’s hidden rupee. The film does have other fascinating concepts, like the stunning CGI effects by Richard Parker, as well as a beautiful soundtrack featuring traditional Hindi music. Sharma also did a remarkable job portraying the young Pi. The story’s narration, however, is its greatest attribute.

K

han is able to take the struggles and religious experiences Pi had been through and make them seem as though he really had been through them. The transition from Sharma to Khan is seamless, and that’s due to Khan’s ability to pick up a character’s emotions where he left it last. Khan’s performance was exactly what it needed to be, not overdone, but still enough to tug heartstrings. Overall, the movie is effective, with a clear theme and a twist ending that thankfully doesn’t fall victim to the M. Night Shyamalan trap. SM

entertainment | movie reviews

Silver Linings Playbook The Weinstein Company ∙ 122 minutes ∙ R by

E

ric Church’s lyrics in “Springsteen” resonate with us all, stating that “it’s funny how a melody sounds like a memory.” In Silver Linings Playbook,

when Pat Solatano (Bradley Cooper) hears his wedding song, it brings back memories of him walking in on his wife cheating on him.

This is one of the many delusions he has. He has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Throughout the movie, the audience is introduced to another side of the mental illness, the realistic side. His illness is triggered when he hears his wedding song, not when he’s at his wedding. In losing his temper, Solatano also loses his wife. His house. Everything. He’s sent to an

Raika Casey

asylum, and the movie begins with his release and his attempt at fixing his life. However, the only life he wants is the one with the woman who cheated on him. Even though she has a restraining order issued against him, he is determined to show her that he is a changed man.

Through an awkward set-up by his only neighbor who isn’t frightened by him, he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a woman who is also mentally ill after losing her husband tragically. The two bond over their pain medications and clink glasses at highs they get from them. There’s a spark, for sure. Pat

Killing Them Softly The Weinstein Company 97 Minutes ∙ R by

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n a society that promotes Toddlers in Tiaras, shoddy 3-D movie re-releases and season four of Community being pushed back, my faith in the entertainment industry is bleak. But sometimes a great movie comes along that proves how the industry can produce interesting and provocative films amidst the Breaking Dawn’s and Red Dawn’s.

Killing Them Softly is set in the slums of New York City as three stupid guys pull off a big job on a major crime syndicate. After the mob realizes that it wasn’t an inside job, Jackie (Brad Pitt) is hired to find and gun them down.

The film, directed by Andrew Dominik, challenges a lot of conventions. Based off George V. Higgins’s 1974 novel, Cogan’s Trade, the movie has the feel of a 1970s gangster movie as everyone wears

Rise of the Guardians Paramount Pictures 97 Minutes ∙ PG

Chris Bowling

leather jackets, smokes cigarettes and drives Chevy Impalas. It’s actually set during the presidential election of 2008 though, which reveals the static nature of the mob in relation to the supposed progressive nature of the country.

The script for the film is amazing: the dialogue is funny, intimidating and thought-provoking, and even though the movie pays homage to the ridiculous spaghettiwestern style, it’s realistic. The cinematography on top of the amazing soundtrack is beautiful.

All of these things considered though, the best part of the movie is its social and political commentary.

The constant reminder of a hopeful Barack Obama juxtaposes Jackie’s cynical view on patriotism and politics. Jackie’s final line where he criticizes the founding fathers by implying they’re power hungry fiends and that a true American is one who works alone is a line that resonates, which is an aspect that most modern movies are unable to attain. SM

doesn’t see the spark though, he just sees himself getting his wife back.

I feel like I know Pat Solantano. Maybe that is what makes Silver Linings Playbook one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

The realistic dialogue, coupled with a dysfunctional family and lifestyle that are relatable makes the viewer feel as though he or she is witnessing not a Hollywood production, but rather a reflection of real life.

The audience feels for Pat as he struggles to control his temper and get his life back in place.

Director David O. Russell does an extraordinary job crafting a movie that can’t be defined by one genre.

It’s a romance that isn’t overdone, a comedy that isn’t ridiculous, and even a tear jerker at times. SM

by Alyssa

I

’ve seen many movies during the holiday season about believing in Santa Claus. Rise of the Guardians takes this genre and builds on it by adding other icons like The Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher), The Sandman, The Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman) and Jack Frost (Chris Pine) to accompany Santa Claus, or as he is known in the movie, North (Alec Baldwin).

The movie’s plot is set around Easter when Jack Frost is picked to join Santa, The Tooth Fairy, The Sandman and The Easter Bunny and become a guardian, who must make sure the children of the world are safe from nightmares and rich with gifts on holidays. This happens right when The Boogeyman, or Pitch Black (Jude Law), starts his evil scheme to get children to stop believing in the guardians and believe in him

Roehm

instead.

Its hokey plot is as cheesy as the names of its characters, but the enduring lessons that the movie presents more than compensate. Jack Frost has lived his whole life not knowing who he is. But his appointment to guardianship begets his search for where he came from and leads him to pursue a purpose in life.

The animation is flawless as the movie travels across the globe to the extravagant homes of the guardians. Familiar characters also get a fresh look without losing what kids love about them. North has a rough accent, and his arms are covered by naughty and nice tattoos. While the Easter Bunny, is tall and tough with an australian accent.

With its new take on old favorites, The Rise of the Guardians gives kids a new reason to believe in icons of the holidays. It may not be the perfect movie for teens, but kids will love seeing all of their favorite holiday characters working together. SM

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entertainment | album reviews

photo used with permission from mctcampus

Album Reviews Rihanna performs at the 2011 Grammy Awards.

EDITOR’S

choice Unapologetic Rihanna by

Hannah Eads

Kid Rock Rebel Soul

Kid Rock’s new album is called Rebel Soul, and the irony of that goes beyond the fact that he endorsed Mitt Romney in the last

WHAT EAST IS LISTENING TO

as told to chris bowling photos by justin york

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A

fter releasing a new album almost every year since 2005, Rihanna’s seventh studio album, Unapologetic, sounds like she knows what she’s doing, like after seven years she is finally content in her music. She sounds confident in her singing, regardless of whether or not the music itself has improved.

Unlike her singles before this presidential election. The album is full of irony, like on “God Save Rock N Roll” when Rock screams “So f--- you all I said long live rock ‘n’ roll,” even though it could only be called rock because there’s an excess amount of guitar and lyrics about being American stuffed into every song. The opening track, “Chickens In The Pen,” is catchy, but with meaningless lyrics, and “Cocaine and Gin” has depth, but it isn’t enough to save the mess of an album.—Dillon Mitchell

Ivana Giang

“Feel Again”

album, “Stay” really showcases how sweet Rihanna’s voice can sound. There’s this nice balance on the album between her soft, serious side and her flirtatious, party-loving side that she hasn’t shown since Good Girl Gone Bad. Songs like “Jump” still have the usual sexual innuendos placed throughout the song, but those don’t put a damper on the music

Alicia Keys Girl On Fire

Girl on Fire is refreshingly “Alicia Keys.” No gimmicks, overly distorted vocals or obnoxious samples. It’s just her

sophomore Sam Beiting

One Republic

“Post Acid”

junior

Wavves

itself. It’s controversies like these that she talks about in “Half of Me,” saying that what she sings is the only side of her that we see and shouldn’t be reason enough to judge her. And the whole album is a reflection of that idea, especially in its latest single, “Diamonds.”

It’s a typical song about love, but it’s refreshing to hear on the radio because it shows that she has much more potential than what she usually lets the radio show.

She can easily showcase her talent, if only she would do it more often instead of letting autotune and repetitive beats overshadow her voice as they do in songs like “Phresh Out The Runway” and “Pour it Up.” It sounds like she finally knows what her goal is in her music despite not being at her best yet.

Overall, Unapologetic is a step in the right direction for Rihanna.

She’s confident and unafraid to be honest in what she sings. Her voice sounds stronger than ever, and it’s nice to see that she has come so far in developing and tweaking her own unique sound. SM

voice, storytelling and passion, all of which make the album so real.

A seemingly sharp turn from her previous album, Girl on Fire is the story of a woman who evolves, reflects and reincarnates into the living embodiment of strength.

The album is an emotional release for Keys, and a further maturation of her style. Keys is a respectable artist because of her dedication to R&B, as well as her evolution as an artist who sings what she truly feels.—Irfan Ibrahim

Nathaniel Lett

“Birthday Song”

senior

2 Chainz

entertainment | classic book review

NINE STORIES J.D. SALINGER publisher little, brown and company release date may 1953 book review zach fulciniti art chris bowling

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he advantageous thing about Nine Stories, a self-explanatory collection of short stories by J.D. Salinger, is that it may serve to convince those on the fence, probably because of a lukewarm reaction to The Catcher in the Rye, that Salinger was indeed an effective writer, and was better than most at embedding himself in the heads of his characters and that it’s one of the things that made him so incisive.

Without having read Salinger’s narration of any other story, it’s hard to understand that he and Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye’s divisive protagonist, are not indeed the same person. He was merely using Caulfield to communicate the angst, fear and confusion with which we all identify in our youth. That’s part of what makes it such a controversial work: it hits almost too close to home.

So with a story like “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” where Salinger builds an altogether different aesthetic and explores different types of characters, it becomes easier to grasp that his prose is inherently hard to swallow because it deals with things that are uncomfortable and often tragic.

That’s not to say that Nine Stories serves no greater purpose than expounding on the method and execution of Salinger’s magnum opus.

By and large, the collection stands on its own as a brilliant exposition of, among other things, the ennui of post-war America and its unintended consequence, suburbia.

“Uncle Wiggily” is probably the most ostensible example of that particular theme: the subject is the home life of Eloise Wengler, whose true love, Walt Glass, was killed in the war. She is now unhappily married to Lew, with whom she has a child, Ramona. It is brief, but haunting, a suburban twist on Fitzgeraldian ethos, yet

peculiarly, relatable. In a number of pages, it damns two of our most prevalent institutions, for tearing us apart in their own separate ways.

The most potent story in the collection, however, is “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” a perfectly constructed and tightly executed tragedy. It is the epitome of everything that gave Salinger so much power over his readers. It is the kind of story that affects you in ways you thought years of having to read good books for school rather than recreation took out of you.

There are stories that address other themes and topics, to lesser degrees of effectiveness, and prevalent in all of them is the general peculiarity of childhood: in “Down at the Dinghy,” Salinger funnels that thing that left the greatest and most lasting impact on us coming out of the war, anti-semitism, through the eyes of a child, a young boy who is subjected to a house servant calling his father a “big sloppy kike.”Although he does not understand the epithet she uses, he understands her intentions in saying it.

“For Esmé­—with Love and Squalor,” rightly considered one of Salinger’s finest stories, uses childhood to the opposite effect. Esmé, the precocious but callous young girl in the story is our collective reaction to the war itself, one of patriotism and general encouragement, but of little effort to understand its full impact. That is to say, casualties of war come in many shapes and sizes, but we understand them as little more than “killed and injured.” The narrator, “Sergeant X,” embodies the side of war we cannot grasp, the emotional and psychological toll.

With the exception of the allegorical and ambiguous “The Laughing Man,” the further Salinger gets from the post-war aesthetic, the weaker the stories get. Catcher in the Rye is certainly proof that Salinger could write more than war stories, but oblique and verbose tales like “De DaumierSmith’s Blue Period” are far less effective. “Teddy” is intriguing and finishes strong, but Salinger never matches the smoldering intensity of the collection’s tour de force, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” No story by Salinger, or possibly any other, presents such a bleak and affecting picture of life after wartime. It is required reading for any and all humans.

Nine Stories is spotty at times: “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” for instance, feels completely irrelevant in contrast with the better, more thematic stories in the collection, but the weaker points certainly don’t sully the stronger ones. The entire collection is probably worth it for “Bananafish” and “Uncle Wiggily” alone, but “Laughing Man” and “For Esmé” are no less compelling.

It is rare that a writer makes a permanent entrance into our conscious with one work, but The Catcher in the Rye is certainly worthy of it. Nine Stories is by no means an afterthought, but in retrospect it is all too good a reminder of Salinger’s retreat from the public eye, and a reminder of what another 50 years worth of his work might have meant to us. SM

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entertainment | red dawn

(not another)

2012

1984

Dillon Mitchell

looks at the cultural significance of John Milius’s original Red Dawn

The original Red Dawn is big and dumb.

It blunders from weary plot point to weary plot point, the characters aren’t particularly likeable and it plays out more like Cold War, pro-American propaganda than an actual movie, because, well, that’s what it is. It holds no purpose other than to spread xenophobia.

And I love it so much.

Set in an alternate version of the 1980s, the film follows Jed and Matt Eckert (Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, respectively) and their group of friends as their small Colorado town is attacked by a joint force of those pesky Ruskies and Cubans. Escaping to the mountains, the group eventually takes arms against the invading forces as they attempt to use guerilla warfare to survive World War III. The film tends to jump into situations without much forethought, and the premise is obviously ludicrous, but it plays into human desire. That is, it

Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen as Jed and Matt Eckert.

56 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

Zach Fulciniti

discusses the nuances of Dan Bradley’s remake of the classic

The Remake appeals to that “what would I do if a shooter came into the school right now” feeling, that protective feeling everyone feels over their home. It might suffer from poor acting, and braindead enemies, and overuse of the word “comrade,” but it’s great for the first hour or so.

Eventually though, the film devolves into child murder on a level paralleled only by Battle Royale, and it ends up becoming too depressing to watch. Regardless, Rad Dawn is a quintessential 80s movie because it provides a hilarious and horrifying look at the American fear and paranoia of the time. It’s completely flawed, but in the most perfect ways.

The ending is ambiguous, and it tries to present the Ultra-MegaSuper-Russian Commander in a pleasant light, but then you remember that this guy has been murdering Americans the entire film and it becomes a moot point, much like the film itself. SM

C. Thomas Howell as Robert Morris.

Contrary to what I expected, The Red Dawn did manage to strike fear and suspense in my heart. From the moment Chris Hemsworth’s character, Thor, steps into the frame it’s impossible not to be terrified.

What does he think he’s doing traipsing about without his uniform? Without even Mjolnir, his trusty hammer? What if the Ice Trolls of Asgard find passage to the human dimension and invade? Who would have egg on his face then?

Thor, that’s who. But luckily the only invaders the Immortal Son of Odin’s Beard has to worry about are the dastardly North Koreans and their babyfacéd vanguard Kim Jong-un, which brings me to my primary gripe.

The original intention for Breaking Dawn: Part Red was to have the Chinese invade America, but after the entire movie had already been shot MGM decided to make the invaders North Korean (with CGI and magicks) to ensure

Brett Cullen as Tom Eckert.

access to the People’s Box Office of China.

I suppose it could be spun as a sign of progress, that we’ve finally become “race blind,” but this isn’t exactly a bunch of white-privileged Gerber babies playing the Lord’s Resistance Army. That would be real progress. This is just racist.

Also prominent in the film, as Thor’s brother (not Loki, he’s slummin’ it in Valhalla), is Josh Peck, the latter, fatter member of Drake and Josh. Peck has slimmed down nicely since his Nickelodeon days, and his character is a star athlete. He still can’t act, but at least now when he’s flopping around like a dead fish on set, he fits in the shot.

Bottom line: Red Dawn is a casually (blatantly) racist, fear-mongering, plotholeladen (we’re talking Jarlsberg, here) mess of a movie. And a breathtaking masterwork.

Watch out, Skyfall, move over, Lincoln: Wolverines! SM

Josh Peck, Josh Hutcherson and Chris Hemsworth as Matt, Robert and Jed, respectively.

entertainment | book review

THE HOBBIT,

OR THERE AND BACK AGAIN

J.R.R. TOLKIEN publisher george allen and unwin release date september 21, 1937 book review amanda weisbrod art jill monson

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very story that has ever been told is about a journey. It’s the outcome and what lessons have been learned along the way that make each new adventure slightly different than the one told before. Usually, once the book is closed, the morals at the end of the story are forgotten. But sometimes, shadowing a character as they travel through the pages of a novel, it’s impossible to forget their experiences. As their eyes open, so does the mind of the reader. The Hobbit is one of those adventures.

Bilbo Baggins is a lazy, lackluster, home-loving hobbit. At least, he is until Gandalf, the famous wizard, comes knocking on his freshly painted green hobbit-hole door. Before he knows it, thirteen obnoxious dwarves are singing in the kitchen of his beloved hobbit-hole and eating all of his food. And because hobbits hate adventures, and anything spontaneous for that matter, Bilbo is extremely unhappy that this unexpected party barged right in. But after a few hours of drinking, the clan of dwarves are able to convince the hobbit to join them on a perilous journey, as their expert burglar.

When he first leaves Bag End, the hobbit neighborhood, Bilbo has no idea how to steal anything, let alone millions of jewels from underneath a dragon’s belly. But after months of traveling, hunger and danger, Bilbo learns that treasure is not necessarily the single most valuable thing to be gained.

The transformation of Bilbo Baggins from chapter one to the end is what makes The Hobbit so incredible.

As he finds himself, so does the reader. And because Tolkien’s writing is so universal, people of all ages, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds can follow Bilbo through the Misty Mountains and the Mirkwood as he learns the value of living life to the fullest. He is so well-rounded and relatable that it would be difficult not to feel a connection to him. Everything the hobbit sees, we see. Everything the hobbit thinks, we think. Therefore, a relationship is formed with this fictitious character. The illusion is so real, that when his adventure is coming to an end, it feels like saying goodbye to a good friend.

The reality of Bilbo is almost unbelievable. Not only because of the way Tolkien describes him, but also because of the way he interacts with the other characters in the book. He fears Smaug, the dragon guarding the treasure, respects Gandalf, who is almost like a father figure to him, and is intrigued by Gollum, the obsessive and deformed creature living in seclusion. Bilbo is the bridge that links us to these other characters.

Without such a vivid protagonist, the other people in the novel would be lost. There would be no understanding of their emotions, actions, or thoughts. They would be completely flat. Bilbo brings life to every character in the story with which he interacts, whether it be a chubby dwarf or a drunken elf. And as he travels along, making friends and enemies of all sorts, a little déjà Read Dillon Mitchell’s vu might hit the reader. It all review of Peter sounds vaguely familiar.

Jackson’s first film in his Hobbit triolgy.

And that’s because it is.

Tolkien based The Hobbit on the Scan to read this story and more 8th century poem, Beowulf, which tells the story of a hero who survives many trials to steal the treasure which is guarded by a dragon in a cave. And since those old days, this story has been repeated over and over. But Tolkien sheds a new light on this classic tale by making the adventure not about the destination, but the journey to get there. He makes timid Bilbo the hero, instead of arrogant Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of the dwarves.

Thorin, from the beginning, is the obvious choice for the hero. After all, he’s confident, courageous and knowledgeable about where they are headed and what they are retrieving. But Tolkien throws a curve-ball.

As Bilbo grows, and Thorin remains stagnant, a shift happens. Openminded Bilbo becomes the hero, and narrow-minded Thorin becomes the fly on the wall.

Lessons taught aren’t always lessons learned. But because of the wonderful connection that Tolkien establishes between the reader and Bilbo through light-hearted language and commonplace morals, we aren’t taught these lessons—they become a part of us. As Bilbo’s eyes open to the fantastic world around him, the reader realizes how wonderful life can be. Even though relaxing at home and having no worries in the world sounds desirable, there is always an itch of adventure or curiosity within each of us.

Proving that, in every one of us, there is a hobbit. SM

Go Online to:

lakotaeastspark.com

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sports | feature

Part

of

the

team

East senior Joey Huff has been the boys’ basketball team manager since freshman year.

He motivates and inspires the players at practice and games, earning himself a true spot on the team. story sydney aten photo michael tedesco infographic rahul mukherjee

After almost dying as an infant, Joey Huff has become a part of the East basketball team.

A

t 18 days old he almost died.

At 18 years old he is just another high school kid.

After he was born healthy, East senior Joey Huff acquired a virus which led to his hospitalization when he was only a few weeks old. A central line was put in his chest to administer medication that would kill the virus.

But, instead of being given an antibiotic that would clean the catheter, he was accidentally given medicine used on prisoners for lethal injections.

Consequently, Huff went into cardiac arrest three times. The lack of oxygen caused him to develop acquired hemiplegic cerebral palsy, a motor condition affecting the left side of the

58 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

body as a result of damage to the right side of the brain.

Although it was difficult to deal with her son’s setbacks, Joey’s mom, Terry Huff, sees him being in front of her every day as a gift of its own.

“It’s a miracle that Joey’s still alive,” Terry says. “He nearly died three times, yet he’s still here today.”

And now even though he has limited movement in his left arm, he is still able to participate in what he loves—sports.

His involvement began when he was just four-years-old playing on “Challenger” football and baseball teams, and a Top Soccer team, all of which enable children with disabilities to get the experience of being on a sports team.

Huff ’s affiliation with sports continued

into high school. Since his freshman year, he has been manager of the East boys’ varsity basketball team. He provides the players with water during games, gives them jerseys during practices and even gets to work out with the team on occasions.

And even though he knows he’ll never get to shoot the game-winning shot—or even get to dribble down the court—Huff doesn’t care.

“I love being the manager because I get to watch all of the games and travel with all my teammates,” Huff says. “Coach Vickers lets me sit on the seats with all players during games and it means a lot because I get to be with my teammates. I root them on since I don’t get to play.”

One of those players Huff has connected with is East senior Zach Panzeca, who has

sports | feature

BRAIN COMPLICATION A look at some of the causes of cerebral palsy

information nih.gov

Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy A lack of oxygen supply may destroy tissue in the cerebral motor cortex.

Intracranial Hemorrhage Blocked or broken blood vessels, weak blood vessels, or blood clots can cause bleeding inside the brain.

Periventricular Leukomalacia These gaps in the brain tissue interfere with transmission signals in the brain.

Cerebral Dysgenesis A disruption in brain development can cause brain malformations that disrupt brain signals or mutations of the DNA.

known him since freshman year.

“Huff is always willing to put the team first and help us out with whatever we need,” Panzeca says. “We all love Joey. He’s a great friend and teammate.”

Panzeca says Huff ’s presence at all of the practices and games is uplifting. He looks at everything Huff has accomplished in life whenever he needs motivation.

“Joey truly inspires me,” Panzeca says. “He has overcome so many obstacles and the fact that he spends his time with us and acts just like any other teammate or friend means a lot.”

East varsity head basketball coach Wally Vickers says last season all of the players enjoyed having Joey around during practices and games.

“Our guys love having him around,” Vickers says. “They consider him part of the team.

They all like having him around and appreciate all of his support.”

East senior Keith Brady, who has known Huff for years and played on the East basketball team through his junior year, says Joey’s personality is the factor that makes him stand out the most.

“Joey is super funny,” Brady says. “He always makes me laugh when I talk to him. The

best thing about him is that he’s always smiling and having such a great time with everyone in whatever he’s doing. He definitely inspired the team with how much he always wants to be with us. Last season he would come up to all of the players in the hallways during school to give us hugs and wish us luck before the game.”

And cheering on his teammates is satisfying enough for Huff. According to his mom Terry, Joey realizes that he will never get to play against rival schools like Lakota West. But he’s there when his teammates make the gamewinning shot, and that’s all that matters to him.

Being a part of the team has helped him get to know students in the building, which helps him develop more confidence.”

That confidence boost is needed because living with cerebral palsy clearly comes with its hardships. His left leg doesn’t function as well as his right one, leaving him with a distinct limp when he walks around his two jobs working at Faith United Methodist Church and in the Liberty Junior High School cafeteria.

“I like being basketball manager at East because I don’t get tackled like I did when I was football manager at Liberty Junior,” Joey says. “When I would help out they would tackle me by accident during practices.”

Although Joey jokes that he’s still been hit in the head multiple times with basketballs, that doesn’t keep him off the court. In fact, in order to help improve his motor skills, Joey works out with East Athletic trainer Cory Jacobs every day.

Dr. James McCarthy, Director of Pediatric Orthopaedic Surgery at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital says that physical and occupational therapy dramatically improve the functioning of motor skills of people who have cerebral palsy.

“Nowadays there are so many resources that doctors and therapists use to try to improve the conditions of kids with [cerebral palsy],” McCarthy says. “Physical and occupational therapy help improve bone and joint structure to help them function better.”

The exercises he does every week in physical and occupational therapy enabled him to achieve one of his greatest feats when he ran in thye Butler County 5K Run-Walk-Roll, a fundraiser for his Challenger Baseball team.

“Everyone was shocked when they saw Joey running in the 5K,” Terry says. “The coaches were so proud of him. His team had the most participants in the run and it made it so much better seeing a kid like Joey out thereactually running in the race. He didn’t allow his disability limit his ability.”

Terry hopes that her son’s positive attitude and high level of involvement in school will allow people to look past his disability and see the true, funny high school kid that he is.

“With Joey being a part of the basketball

It’s a miracle that Joey’s still alive. He nearly died three times, yet he’s still here today.

—Joey’s mother Terry Huff

“Being involved with the basketball team has kept him in high spirits and has helped him stay connected to other students at East,” Terry says. “We’ll go to the grocery store and someone will say, ‘Hey Joey, how you doing?’

team, I think it teaches people to be open minded,” Terry says. “Knowing that he has a disability, yet is still able to inspire so many people, I feel proud, I feel inspired watching him motivate and teach his peers.” SM

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sports | indepth

Game

CHANGER

The culture of sports has changed because of club teams, OHSAA rules and the new concept of the single-sport athlete. Spark takes an in-depth look at various East athletes, and how the changes have affected them. story natasha rausch I photos nick kanaly I infographic emily chao

The Majority

Austin emrick Sport: basketball position: guard year: senior 2011 season total: 86 pts college: undecided 60 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

East senior Austin Emrick was born with a basketball. At the University of Findlay hospital, his father, David Emrick, laid a ball bigger than his body right next to him in his crib—just to pass along the family tradition.

“I’ve been playing for as long as I can remember,” Austin says. “It kind of just runs in the family. My dad played at the University of Findlay. My uncles played and all of my cousins play so it’s just kind of a whole family ordeal.”

After starting his career swooshing hoops through the Playskool basket in his basement, Austin began playing on the St. Max Catholic Youth Organization team as a first grader. But other kids his age were already nationally ranked players participating in state tournaments.

“I invested a lot of time into my basketball career, but not as much as half of the kids who are playing these days,” Austin says. “These days there are third graders traveling to Nationals on teams with 17 little kids who can’t even spell their own names. The whole [Amateur Athletic Union] AAU organization is expanding so much because everyone is interested in playing basketball and ranking kids.”

Prior to the adoption of the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, the AAU was in control of all amateur sports, including making the by-laws.

This act, however, created National Governing Bodies for each amateur sport in order to have more control over Olympic athletes. This left AAU as a club-sport organization for the sole purpose of developing young athletes beyond the high school teams.

According to Ohio AAU Director and

Lakota West girls’ varsity basketball coach Andy Fishman high school sports and club sports are “night and day.”

“Playing club sports is easy,” Fishman says.

“There is not the same level of commitment to your team and to your program. You get to be completely selfish in that players play club sports for the specific reason to get better and to get recruited.”

But for high school players, finding an AAU team to play on is sometimes the hard part.

According to the Ohio High School Athletic Association’s (OHSAA) regulations, the 50 percent limitation dictates that only two players from the high school basketball team can play on the same club team. This is because the OHSAA takes the number of starting players in a sport and says that only half of that number can play on a club team together. Volleyball has six players on a court at once, so three of them can be on the same club team. Soccer has 11 players on the field at once, so only five can be on a team.

When Austin competed against two of his East teammates, Rob Harpring and Zach Panzeca, for one of the 12 spots on the Shining Stars team, he was really competing for one of the two spots permitted by the OHSAA. “I was banking on making that team,” Austin says. “But when I got the news that I wasn’t playing with them, I felt pushed out.

And it left me scrambling to find a last-minute option.”

Other states such as Indiana have no laws regarding the number of players who can

sports | indepth participate on a club team together. According to OHSAA Assistant Commissioner Jerry Snodgrass, the 50 percent limitation was created in order to cater to the 97 percent of high school athletes who do not continue to play the sport at the collegiate level. If it wasn’t there, then only a select few players would be able to participate in athletics.

“The rule was established to discourage year-round teams from playing and eliminating opportunities for kids,” Snodgrass says. “People don’t want to hear this, but [the OHSAA] doesn’t exist for the three percent. We exist for the 97 percent. What our rules don’t allow is a coach to develop his team outside of the season. Our rules are designed to give kids a break. If they want to go get that exposure, they can go through the club route.”

What is most upsetting to Fishman is that college coaches are unable to see his players during the season that requires the athlete to commit to sportsmanship, become a teamplayer and develop self-discipline—the high school season. “[High school sports are] about becoming a better person through athletics,” Fishman says.

“Club sports don’t care about the individual as a student. Club sports just care that you can play the game well. There is no substanceabuse policy or GPA requirement. Conceivably, we could have a student on a club soccer team that doesn’t even play on the school team who can get drunk and fail classes and can still be eligible to play on that team.”

Snodgrass, however, says that the OHSAA has no control over the rules and regulations of club teams. Because high school sports require more commitment and dedication than the club sports, he believes the NCAA should attempt to take the time to recruit more from the high school athletic seasons.

“If the NCAA, with all of their millions

there won’t be one coach in Andy Fishman’s gymnasium and that is a shame. Shame on the NCAA for adding to the one-sport athlete, the disillusioned kid who thinks they are going to get a Division I scholarship and doesn’t. We are trying to challenge the NCAA to change their regulations as opposed to us changing ours to benefit the three percent.”

Although Austin has carried on the family basketball tradition since he was born, he has decided to become part of the 97 percent that doesn’t play sports at the collegiate level.

Austin got several looks from college coaches, but after weighing the pros and cons, he says he would rather pick the college for the academics than for the basketball program.

“That last game, it’s going to be rough. My four best friends are all on the basketball team and we have all been playing together since seventh grade,” Austin says. “Knowing that I am going to have to give up something that I have been doing for so long—I just don’t want to think about that.”

Cailyn Wachtel Sport: volleyball position: defense specialist year: junior Club Team: Cincy Classics serving percentage: 94% and millions and millions of dollars would add one coach to their staff that could recruit during the season, most of our problems would be over,” Snodgrass says. “But as it is right now, during the basketball season

The Multi-Sport Athlete

Unlike Austin, East junior Cailyn Wachtel has already played her last basketball game.

Although she played on the East varsity basketball team as a freshman, she also played on the varsity volleyball team. She was a multisport athlete—a dying breed.

During her freshman season, the East girls’ volleyball team lost in the elite eight in the State Tournament. The very next day, Wachtel went to basketball practice. Club volleyball started at the same time.

Wachtel was tired of showing up an hour late to volleyball practice, and she was tired of missing entire tournaments so she could be involved with East basketball. After one season on the team, Wachtel decided to quit basketball, making her a single-sport athlete.

Mason HS athletes, paying $150 per sport, can play two sports, pay for equipment and have money left over compared to the $550 that East athletes pay to play only one sport.

$550 =

Cost to play one sport in Lakota

$150 + $150 + $150 + $100 Cost to run cross country at Mason HS

$140

Compared to 2009, Lakota pay-to-play sports fees $280 family cap has almost quadrupled levy failed 62-38 percent for high school athletes.

2009-2010

Average cost of cross country equipment

Cost to participate in track and field at Mason HS

Money left over

$300

$550

$550

2010-2011

2011-2012

2012-2013

no family cap no family cap levy failed 53-47 percent levy failed 54-46 percent

information eastthunderhawks.com, masoncomets.com, sycamoreaviators.com, lakotaonline.com, spark archives

HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS: HIGHER PRICES FOR LAKOTA ATHLETES

no levy on ballot

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INJURY CORNER: WHAT ARE THE RISKS? “Risk of injury increases with the volume of activity.”

Dr. Marc Galloway, Head Physician for the Cincinnati Bengals

Multi-sport athletes

SINGLE-SPORT athletes

are “better-protected” because they tend to exercise different muscle groups and have different movement patterns during different seasons.

who play their sport all year long, tend to have overuse injuries like joint tendonitis and shin splints due to repetitive movements and micro-trauma.

BASEBALL and SOCCER

FOOTBALL athletes, although playing a more dangerous sport, tend to play multiple sports due to a shorter fall-based season.

athletes, according to Dr. Galloway, tend to have long year-round seasons, increasing risk for injury. information dr. marc galloway, american orthopaedic society for sports medicine

Jarett Rindfleisch Sport: baseball position: catcher year: senior Club Team: Ohio heat recruited to play at: Ball State University “I always had feelings about quitting, but I never thought I actually would,” Wachtel says. “[Playing both sports] just wasn’t worth it. I don’t regret my decision, but my parents said I would regret it later on in life.”

After quitting AAU and East basketball, Wachtel stuck with her high school and club volleyball teams which keep her busy yearround.

Cailyn’s mom, Judy Wachtel, says that it was a tough decision for Cailyn to make, but the off-season training coupled with the club and high school teams was too much to handle.

“It was a big decision, and it was hard for her. I miss [basketball] and I wish she could have played both sports for four years, but I just don’t think it’s possible at a Division I school like East,” Judy says. “I look back at all of the times she played, and sometimes I feel that if she could have stayed at basketball, I

think she would have been a great player.”

While multi-sport athletes are becoming rare, just 17 years ago, they were the norm. Varsity basketball coach Nikki Drew participated in soccer, softball and basketball for all four years of her high school career. Drew says that playing multiple sports isn’t practical anymore because of the focus on sport-specialization.

If athletes want a chance at college looks, they must choose one sport.

“Guys can be multiple sport athletes more than females because if girls want a scholarship, then they’ve got to start focusing,” Drew says. “[Sport-specialization] probably occurs because of the bigger value on winning than there used to be. It used to be in sports, everybody play, everybody have fun. It’s kind of changing to win win win.”

The OHSAA is still trying to promote the multi-sport mentality by saying it is part of the high school experience. Regulations have been established to promote this kind of mentality. In section 6.9 of the General Sports Regulations, high school coaches are only permitted to coach at 10 practices from June 1 to July 31. Other General Sports regulations regarding off-season open gyms and facilities mandate little to no coach involvement and that a players’ spot on the team cannot be contingent on attendance or participation.

These regulations give high school athletes a better opportunity to play other club and/or high school sports. “[Playing more than one sport] is important because the value of high school sports is to give athletes the experience and the

opportunity,” Snodgrass says. “But the number of [multiple-sport athletes] is diminishing fast.

Single-sport athletes are becoming the norm because at age two everybody thinks that they will be going into the NFL and the only way to get into the NFL is to concentrate on only football.”

Besides giving athletes the experience of playing more than one high school sport, multiple sports have also been proven to reduce the number of sport-induced injuries.

According to the head team physician for the Cincinnati Bengals, Marc Galloway, this is because athletes can focus on exercising different muscles through different sports, whereas playing one sport year-round causes athletes to be more prone to injury.

Galloway says that baseball and soccer are the two biggest examples of sports that cause injuries as a result of specialization. According to him, single-sport athletes hardly get any breaks. The never have “downtime.”

“The risk of injuries increases with the volume of activity that they do [with one sport],” says Galloway, a former multi-sport athlete. “Someone who is doing multi-sports is better protected than the folks who are trying to do a single sport year-round.”

The Three Percent

East senior Jarett Rindfleisch didn’t fall short of the injury trend. During his junior season of high school baseball he was forced to sit the bench due to a hip injury. He missed out on the most important season of college recruiting.

“Shame on the NCAA for adding to the one-sport athlete, the disillusioned kid that thinks they are going to get a Division I scholarship and doesn’t.”

62 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

sports | indepth sports | indepth

College coaches have a hard time coming to watch players during the school season because their seasons run parallel. They resort to recruiting during the club season.

photo illustration nick kanaly

But he can still categorize himself among the three percent—the minority of athletes who pursue a career beyond the high school level. After going through an extensive recruiting process, Rindfleisch signed at Ball State University (BSU), a Division I school.

Playing on his summer club team, the Ohio Heat, allowed him to be recruited by schools like BSU, Miami University Oxford, Xavier University and Ohio University.

Because high school seasons run parallel with collegiate seasons, college coaches don’t usually have the time to take out of their season to recruit from the high schools. They recruit in the offseason—the club season.

Besides playing for summer teams, Rindfleisch also participated in events like the Atlanta Braves workout where high school athletes go just to “get their name out there.”

His club coach, Jeff Gatch, was also helpful in networking college coaches to recruit him by creating a 10-minute video of Rindfleisch’s skills.

“I have done over 200 videos for kids who want to go play baseball in college. When I first got started doing it, I surveyed all different kinds of coaches and asked them what they wanted to see and how they wanted to see it and how I could make the recruiting process easier for the college coaches,” Gatch says.

“Jarett is a catcher, so we followed the script of what we do for catchers and we try to highlight their skills. The interviews from his high school coach, me and his catching coach are character references of what kind of person he is, like what kind of work ethic, character and leadership skills he has.”

The calls and videos sent to college coaches

helped Rindfleisch at the start of his collegerecruiting process. Next, he had to play well during his summer season because the recruiters would be coming to every game. According to Gatch, the season went “perfectly” for Rindfleisch. All that was left was choosing the school. That was the easy part. BSU was “just the right fit.” “[Jarett] has physical giftedness,” BSU head coach Rich Maloney says. “He’s strong and he’s got leadership potential. We think he is a good catcher who has a chance to get even better. We really liked him this summer and hope that he’ll make a positive difference for our program.”

The Football Player

The development of club sports has changed the recruiting process for most sports.

But football is different. Because football

1000 Athletes High School Athletes NCAA Student Athletes NCAA Student Athletes Drafted into Professional Leagues

information ncaa research

BY THE NUMBERS: WHERE ATHLETES GO FROM HIGH SCHOOL

data combined from men’s basketball, women’s basketball, football, baseball, men’s ice hockey, and men’s soccer www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 63

sports | indepth

“I wanted to play in college since I was a kid.

You know the little Tomahawk players who want to

sideNote:

Title IX

play at Ohio State and Notre Dame? That was me.”

64 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

he dreamt about playing since his adolescence as a Tomahawk.

“I wanted to play in college since I was a little kid. You know how all of the little Tomahawk players want to play at Ohio State and Notre Dame? That was me,” says DeZarn who took a full-ride academic scholarship to Lehigh University. “Anytime somebody tells you that they don’t want you or you didn’t make the cut, it’s disappointing.”

So after 10 games during his senior year and after being recruited by Ivy League and Patriot League schools, DeZarn had to leave behind his Tomahawk dreams.

In the end, he was relieved. Relieved that he wouldn’t have to spend 11 hours each day with a college football team and relieved that he could have moments of relaxation in high school. He even had enough time to become the class president at Lehigh University.

Although Max DeZarn was the captain of the football team, he had to face the tough decision of not being able to play football at the collegiate level. Although Austin Emrick was born with a basketball, he has decided to join the majority by ending his career after his senior season. Although Jarett Rindfleisch broke his hip during his junior year, he has been recruited to play at the Division I level.

And although Cailyn Wachtel made the varsity basketball team as a freshman, she faced the decision of becoming a single-sport player adding to the diminishing numbers of multisport athletes.

They, along with every other varsity high school athlete, have faced the new culture of sports. SM

EAST SURVEYED

34

percent of 325 East students surveyed who play club sports

2012-13 East athletes who signed National Letters of Intent as of Dec. 1

Ali Lake Ohio Univ.

Derek Baker Ashley Evans Ashland Univ. Purdue Univ.

information east survey, dan hilen, east athletics photos used with permission of eastthiunderhawks.com

players do not have the opportunity to play on a club team, it is often more difficult for recruiters to watch games because of the parallel seasons. Newer technology, however, is helpful in making the process smoother.

According to varsity football coach Rick Haynes, Hudl allows players to make their own highlight film and send the link to college coaches.

For East alumnus and 2011 football captain Max DeZarn, Hudl helped him to get exposure to colleges as well as get recruited by Ivy League schools like Columbia, Yale and Harvard and

by Patriot League schools like Colgate, Lehigh and Holy Cross.

But 10 games was all that DeZarn had to prove himself to colleges each season.

“You only get 10 games every year if you are able to stay healthy,” DeZarn says. “Let’s say you get banged up, you roll your ankle, and you miss a week or two. That means that you have eight games for a coach to come out and watch you or that means that you have eight games to put yourself on film and send to a coach. It’s just less opportunities to get in front of coaches and prove to them that you can play at that school.”

Although football players have fewer opportunities to show their skills to colleges, Haynes says that club teams are not necessary.

“Football has nothing like AAU basketball or club volleyball and club soccer,” Haynes says. “Part of that is because it’s so taxing on your body. A high school kid trying to play football two seasons out of the year, I think would be hard for him to do.”

But even club football is not completely out of the question. According to Snodgrass, club teams known as the Crusaders are beginning to pop up in the state of Ohio. They play during the regular high school season and the OHSAA permits them to play against high school teams. Football club sports haven’t had any effects on college recruiting, but right now they are only in the beginning stages.

During his career DeZarn participated in several football camps outside of the high school season. And by January of his senior year, he made the recruiting list for Lehigh, Columbia, Brown and Yale. If only one or two more guys had said no to their offers from Lehigh and Brown, DeZarn would have made the final cut. Yale and Columbia were the other two options, but because the head coaches were replaced after the season, DeZarn didn’t make the list. In February of his senior year, he realized he was about to become part of the majority—he was about to quit the sport that

sidebar sophia li Title IX is the best thing that ever happened to college women’s sports, says East varsity girls’ golf coach Cindy Feltman about the amendment that passed 40 years ago.

Feltman clarifies that Title IX is not the best thing that happened to college sports in general, however, because of the adverse effect it has had on men’s collegiate athletics.

With its enactment in June 1972, Title IX determined the factors used to determine and ensure equal treatment of the sexes. While the legislation does not specifically mention sports, athletics at the high school and college level has been one of the most impacted areas.

Effectively, schools are required to have an equal number of teams and funding for male and female sports. Feltman witnessed these changes firsthand during her years playing basketball at Xavier University.

“The difference when I came in [to Xavier] and the difference when I left was night and day,” says Feltman, who played at Xavier from 1979 to 1983. “When I first got there, [female athletes] got one pair of shoes, maybe travel gear and a jacket. By the time I left, they gave you more gear than you could ever imagine...for us, because we had never had it before, it was a luxury.”

East baseball coach Ray Hamilton also believes that Title IX has been good for women’s athletics but not necessarily so for men’s.

“What it is designed to do is a great thing,” Hamilton says. “What sometimes happens in order to achieve the equality of what Title IX does is a bad thing, because now you start to talk about eliminating opportunities in some other men’s sport just to meet a quota for Title IX. I think that’s wrong.”

Many colleges have ended certain male sports programs to stay within the regulations of Title IX. Feltman saw this downside to the legislation in the decrease of opportunities for her husband, a wrestler.

“I do feel bad,” Feltman says.

“Because on one hand, it helped me tremendously. On the other hand, it hurt my husband dramatically. His opportunities were severely cut. And I don’t think that’s what Title IX really intended to do.” SM

sports | indepth

The Cost and Culture of Sports The differences of the prices varies between different sports as a result of the costs of equipment. The cost also varies between club and school athletics.

800 700 600 500

$385

400 300 200 100 0

$155 120 Cleats 20 Shin guards 15 Ball

275 Bat 85 Glove 25 Batting Gloves

$133

$115

80 Racquet 3 Ball 50 Shoes

10 Ball 70 Shoes 35 Clothing

$205

90 Stick 15 Mouth Guard 25 Eye Gear 70 Cleats

$150 75 Shoes 50 Spikes 25 Shorts

$200

20 Knee Pads 20 Spandex 80 Active Ankles 70 Shoes 10 Socks

information adidas, nike, soccerpro.com, sports.whatitcosts.com, hannah lee, brett colburn, natasha rausch, claire middleton, jeff back, sophia li, sam hauck

$850 120 Golf Shoes 700 Golf Clubs 30 A Dozen Golf Balls

*Prices tend to vary widely and uniform costs not included

900

AVERAGE COST OF EQUIPMENT FOR VARIOUS SPORTS

CLUB VS. SCHOOL: WHATâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S THE DIFFERENCE School Sports

Tend to be year-round, with practices 1-3 times each week and tournaments every few weekends.

Season tends to be a few months long, practices every weekday, tournaments during the week.

Club sports tend to cost more due to tournament fees and year-round coaching fees, as well as club fees.

High school sporting fees tend to be lower than club sports, but are rising due to lack of athletic funds in schools.

Recruiters target more athletes from club sports due to the availability of athletes during high school pre and post season.

Recruiters have difficulty recruiting high school athletes due to regulated times and pre and post season.

SPORTS REGULATIONS: OHSAA VS. AAU Ohio High School Athletic Association OHSAA prohibits student athletes from competing in non-interscholastic competitions during a high school season for the same sport.

Amateur Athletic Association An athlete competing in club sports can be members of multiple clubs and can transfer to another club in the same sport under certain competition conditions.

information ohsaa sports regulations, aau bylaws, andy fishman, jerry snodgrass

Club Sports

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sports | indepth

BALANCING ACT

East junior Michelle Peters prepares to do her routine on bars.

66 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

Junior Michelle Peters works on her bar routine during gymnastics practice.

After playing club gymnastics for most of her life, Michelle Peters decided to switch to playing for the school team so she can focus more on enjoying this sport.

A

story claire middleton I photos ellen fleetwood

fter practicing her routine multiple times on a nearby line on the ground, East junior Michelle Peters walks up to her least favorite event—beam.

As the crowd watches, Peters envisions her routine one last time. She breathes and performs a simple handstand on the ground parallel to the beam. She rolls sideways on the beam, swings her feet up and stands four feet in the air. Exhaling, she begins her routine.

Turning, twisting and leaping she loses her balance and falls off. She climbs back up on the beam and continues. She falls, again. And again. In total, she falls five times before she completes her routine. But that doesn’t phase her. She just laughs it off.

“I’m really clumsy so I trip over a lot of things, especially at practice,” Peters says.

“When I fall it’s embarrassing at first, but you kind of just have to laugh about it and think about how you’re going to fix it for the next time.”

When Peters was younger she tried almost every sport. She did not focus on one, however, until she found gymnastics, which has been all she has known since the fourth grade when she joined a competitive level six team at Flip and Twist.

Competitive gymnastics quickly took its toll on Peters. On top of the $3,000 fee each year, her coaches were strict, and the amount of time spent at practice became too much. At the end of her eighth grade year she was ready for something different.

“I knew that I wanted to do high school [gymnastics] for long time,” Peters says.

“Once I started high school, I was done with competitive. [Competitive and school] are both so different. In school gymnastics, you can do what you want. In competitive, they force you to do a lot of things I’m not very good at—like back handsprings.”

Michelle’s mom, Jill Peters, says that she wasn’t upset at all when Michelle wanted to quit

competitive gymnastics and switch to the more laid back high school team.

“Being a part of the high school team was more up Michelle’s ally,” Jill says.

“She enjoys that whole team atmosphere, and it’s more casual than club was.”

In high school if she misses practice because of homework, it’s no big deal. If she ever made a small mistake in a routine in club, there were tears.

According to Michelle’s high school coach, Margi Sammons, Michelle has been a great leader on the team, especially with the younger girls.

“Michelle is just a fun girl,” Sammons says.

“She’s a good leader by example since she works hard every time she comes to practice.

She’s great to bring the stress level down and make the girls laugh.”

East junior and teammate Natalie Potts, who has been a friend of Michelle’s since they both joined the team as freshmen, says that Michelle always makes her laugh and that she enjoys competing with her.

According to Potts, Peters sometimes brings in cupcakes to practice. Last season Peters said she wanted to own her own cupcake factory.

“She was always saying, ‘Welcome to the cupcake factory!’ in this really funny voice,” Potts says. “We ended up making that the quote on the back of her shirt when we picked out team shirts.”

Because gymnastics is a sport where injuries are common, Michelle says that she is lucky that the only major injury she has ever sustained is a sprained ankle, which she got last year. Even though she is sometimes scared of doing certain skills, like the beam event, Michelle

claims that after she practices them multiple times they are not as bad.

“You just kind of realize, ‘Oh, I’m not going to die today,’” Michelle says. “A lot of the stuff I’m scared to do is on beam. I usually start on a smaller beam and work my way up.

That’s basically how it is for all the events.”

Although gymnastics has been such a large part in her life, Michelle says she does not want to continue at the collegiate level because she wants to give her body a break from the rigorous stress levels that gymnastics places on it.

Nevertheless, gymnastics has taught Michelle valuable things that she will never forget. Despite taking away from her free time as well as dedicating most of her life in the gym, she says she has learned so much from the sport.

“Gymnastics is really beneficial,” Michelle says. “The biggest thing I’ve learned is selfdiscipline—especially from club. The coaches knew when you were cheating yourself, so it just made you work harder.” SM

“In school gymnastics, you can do what you want. In competitive, they force you to do a lot of things I’m not very good at—like back handsprings.” www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 67

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A League of THeir own

After playing for the East basketball team for three years, seniors China Palmore and Morgan Costa have decided to pursue the club route. story kyle culp I photos nick kanaly

E

ast senior Chamoda Palmore had the dream senior sports season. Starting at running back on the first playoff team in school history. Scoring two touchdowns of over 70 yards. Making secondteam all-conference. But while his senior season couldn’t have gone any better, his aunt, China’s, dream season is just that: a dream.

For East seniors and former girls’ basketball players China Palmore and Morgan Costa, it was a mix of not having enough time in their schedules, disagreements with the coach’s decisions and a prevalence of young talent that led to them to not playing their senior seasons.

Instead, the pair decided to pursue playing on a club basketball team.

Costa has just begun working at the Polo Ralph Lauren factory store to make money for college, so playing for a club team with less practice time a week made sense. China is participating in the post-secondary program that East offers, which also gives her a lot less time to fit in the after-school two hour practices that are associated with high school basketball.

With such a strong sophomore class this season, East girls’ basketball head coach Nikki

Seniors Morgan Costa and China Palmore practice their game with their basketball club team.

68 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

Drew also had to decide between experience and young talent. Knowing this, she felt obligated to let the returning players know what their playing situations would be.

“After the first few weeks of practice and conditioning, we had a list of all the girl’s strengths and weaknesses and pulled each girl aside to let them know the kind of minutes they would be working with this season,” Drew says. “With the pay to play fee being so high, this is the only way that really seems fair.”

For Costa, this seemed all too familiar. She felt like she wouldn’t be getting the kind of playing time she was looking for, just like what had happened to her older sister Megan in the 2010-11 season.

“I just didn’t want to spend my senior season like my sister did,” Morgan says, “Megan was miserable on the bench all during her senior year. Now, I can practice more on my own game and not deal with the same situation.”

As for China, she decided back in May, before preseason workouts had even started, that she would not return to the team for the very same reason.

“I never really pictured not playing my senior season,” China says. “But I feel like not playing was definitely the best choice for me as a player.

Practicing on my own gives me a lot more time and a chance to grow.”

After Morgan’s decision, her mother, Mary Costa, began searching for club teams that were having tryouts soon. The options for girls, though, were slim. Morgan decided to try out for a team at McGee’s Courts 4 Sports and asked China to come with her. When they arrived, there were not enough girls to even make a team, so the coaches told Morgan and China they could either tryout for the boys’ team or

go home and search for other options.

“I searched the internet for hours for other options,” says Mary, “Unfortunately, it seems, a lot of girls drop out of sports, for a variety of reasons, and if you want to play basketball outside of school or AAU, the boys are it.”

The duo never let that slow them down, and by the end of tryouts for the boys’ team they had earned spots on the “A” team. The first day of practice went as they expected: a few odd looks to begin with, but as it went on the team started to mesh. It has taken some adjusting for Morgan and China, but they are willing to work on their skills and adapt to the changes.

“This team allows me to show a different side of my game,” China says. “Boys play a much faster, more athletic game, so at some times I have to match that intensity, and other times I’m there to slow it down and make the boys pass the ball around.”

Their coach, Brandon Begley says Morgan and China have no trouble competing with the boys, and get the “respect” they deserve.

“They came into tryouts ready and are willing to play hard,” says Begley. “Now that they are on the team, it is clear they have a lot of heart and great attitudes. They both will play very valuable minutes for the team.”

Even though they have given up on high school basketball, both Morgan and China still have offers to play in college. Morgan is being talked to by a few colleges including Walsh University, where she has the opportunity to play both lacrosse and basketball for the school.

China is also being looked at by Denison University.

But as for this year, the two just want to play the sport they love.

“More than anything Morgan wants to play basketball,” says Mary. “Playing for this team will help her do that. In the end, I hope playing for a club team helps heal some of the pain that deciding not to play for East created.” SM

sports | column

Cheering away the stereotype ELLEN KASIK

Staff contributor contact ellen at ellen.kasik@lakotaeastspark.com

T

he words of my brother drip off his tongue like poison.

“Cheerleading isn’t a sport. All you do is stand there!”

“At least we’re not running the ball to the wrong side of the field, like football players do!” I reply.

He fired his words at me like an arsenal attack, never missing a chance for a good burn. I wanted to herkie him in the mouth.

“That’s better than cheering for the wrong team.”

It wasn’t just his morning breath that stung me—it was the meaning behind his words.

It seems like people think that cheerleading is some ditsy dance routine fashioned by a couple of witless women who can’t toss the pig skin around.

Only after I switch my uniform for ordinary clothes and blend in with the crowd do people see me as just another person rather than “that cheerleader.” Throughout my high school career, I will be defined by glittery cheerleading bows and toe touches.

I am part of a stereotype that I will never be able to escape.

The media’s negative view on cheerleaders has been magnified ever since the 2000 teen comedy “Bring it On” was released. Diets, sex scandals and insane choreographers show the public how “real” cheerleaders act.

The common image is a bunch of bimbo cheerleaders who promote anorexia just to make the squad. or years, cheerleaders have been depicted as villains, causing turmoil throughout their high schools. From the singing scandalous cheerleaders in Glee to the two-faced malicious ones in the MTV show Awkward, cheerleaders’ sole purpose is portrayed only to create chaos and low self-esteem among their peers.

To further the stereotype, major sports leagues such as the National Football League (NFL), depict cheerleaders as halfdressed, spray-tanned, fake-haired women whom the public expects to look beautiful while performing in front of thousands of ogling men. The NFL portrays the girls as nothing but senseless dancers who wear plastic cowboy boots, when in fact, NFL

F

cheerleaders take months out of their lives to practice and rehearse their routines. The paycheck of $75 a game doesn’t add much to the incentives of being a cheerleader either, and game days for professional cheerleaders can last up to 12 hours. Yet, they are paid next to nothing for contributions to the public. onetheless, people seem to think that just because the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders have their own show and are featured in every home game, that all cheerleaders are Texas beauty queens.

N

People seem to think that just because the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders have their own show and are featured in every home game, that all cheerleaders are Texas beauty queens.

The media has taught society to hate cheerleaders’ forced smiles and overly peppy cheers. People don’t want to support it as a sport because it’s portrayed in an adverse way.

In reality, we take just as much time out of their day as other athletes, yet are shunned because of the stereotype.

It isn’t just good entertainment. It’s a sport.

Cheerleaders are not only in charge of getting the crowd amped for that big game,

but they’re gymnasts. We go through years of conditioning to get to the level of flexibility needed for strenuous jumps and tumbling.

Our bodies go through rigorous strength conditioning and routine rehearsals to stay fit. Maybe dance practice isn’t the two-hourlong basketball conditioning sessions. Maybe pep-rallies aren’t the three miles that track runners sprint each day. Maybe tumbling sessions aren’t the fully padded two-a-days that football players endure. But without a doubt, cheerleading takes skill, concentration and athleticism. n truth, some high schools across the country try to shatter cheerleading stereotypes by getting students involved in the squad. A high school cheerleading squad in Duncanville, Texas is interwoven with special needs students who are cheerleaders.

Captain Genesis Moataned said, “We cheer for every person. It’s wonderful to do it.”

Even cheerleaders at East raise awareness of childhood diseases through raising money for donations to the St. Jude Foundation.

We volunteer to cheer at neighboring Lakota schools and East fundraisers.

Every day, high school cheerleaders make an effort to break away from the media’s stereotype, while also showing the public that an activity that takes so much dedication and training should be considered a sport. et the mind of my brother wouldn’t budge. I heatedly stared into his eyes, wondering if everyone believed the media’s advertisement of cheerleaders.

“Why don’t you just go back to spelling ‘defense’ wrong?” he spat.

Whether it is the media’s portrayal of cheerleading or the public’s unwillingness to recognize them as anything but girls in skimpy outfits, I know that I will always be seen as “that cheerleader.”

The only way I will ever get over my stereotype is to show people the media’s false depiction of cheerleaders. They are more than just short skirts and pom-poms; they’re dedicated athletes.

Besides, the last thing we need is a band of airheaded girls on the sideline cheering for the wrong team. SM

I

Y

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 69

sports | indepth

A very Critical Ligament

After suffering ACL injuries, three East athletes discuss the multiple options for surgery, the rehabilitation process and the massive impact the injury can have on college recruitment. story john grasty | photos michael tedesco | infographic jack dombrowski

70 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

Injuri + s

Part one of a series on injuries. Part two will be concussions. averaged 17.5 points per game, which would have ranked second in the Greater Miami Conference (GMC) on the season.

“It was the worst feeling knowing I couldn’t get out there,” Lowry says. “Some of the games we wouldn’t score a lot and I just hated watching.”

Not only did Lowry miss the rest of the 2011-12 season, but he also missed the two weekends in April that colleges were allowed to watch AAU games, which is one of the peak times for recruitment during an athlete’s junior year. Sitting on the sidelines, his chance at a Division I scholarship slowly slipped away.

A college scholarship was one of the last things on East senior girls’ volleyball player Ali

photo nick kanaly

E

ast senior Stedman Lowry took a defensive rebound and thundered down the court at the Beach Ball Classic in Myrtle Beach, one of the nation’s premiere holiday prep basketball tournaments. Playing the host Socastee High School and only four minutes into the game, he leaned into a defender, going up for a shot.

He slipped.

Then he heard a pop.

Immediately, he knew it was bad.

A few days later, his MRI results came back, confirming his worst fears. He had completely torn his right anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).

His junior basketball season was over.

“I wasn’t overly surprised but I was pretty upset,” Lowry says. “I’d felt worse pain before.

It was just especially bad because [Duke men’s basketball coach] Mike Krzyzewski was going to be at the next game since we were playing one of the best teams in the country. I’ve been a Duke fan all my life so I was really looking forward to playing in front of him.”

The ACL that Lowry tore is one of four ligaments found in the knee and is responsible for limiting the motion between the upper and lower leg. When it is stretched too far, it can be torn. Injuries are classified as contact or noncontact. Contact injuries are usually the result of a blow to the knee that bends it further than the ligament can stretch. According to Cincinnati Bengals head team physician Marc Galloway, the non-contact injuries, which is what Lowry’s was classified as, usually occur in a similar fashion, when an athlete overextends their knee, and typically happens when they are abruptly changing direction.

After Lowry’s injury, the rest of the season was a struggle for the East basketball team.

They would go onto an overall record of 8-13, including a six-game losing streak in the middle of the season as Lowry watched from the bench. Five times they were held to 40 points or less. In his four full games, Lowry had

Stedman Lowry has had to wear a knee brace since his ACL surgery.

Lake’s mind when she was warming up for a game against Mercy High School. She had been verbally committed for over a year to Ohio University (OU), and it was only a matter of time until she signed her National Letter of Intent (NLI).

But when she landed on teammate NaDiah Fry’s foot on her last jump serve of warm-ups and felt pain in her left knee, the thought began to cross her mind. After getting evaluated later that night, she was told it was “most likely” not a tear of her ACL or any other knee ligament.

“I didn’t hear it, but I felt it, and you just know,” Lake says. “It’s not really pain, it’s just complete shock, like everything stops. It’s the worst case scenario.”

And when the results of her MRI came back a few days later, her worst case scenario became a reality. She then had to call OU head volleyball coach Ryan Theis and tell him she had completely torn her left ACL and partially torn her meniscus.

“He said this was the first time a recruit had been injured,” Lake says. “He reassured me I was still on the team and had kept my scholarship.”

Because of numerous physical factors, such as a higher ratio of quadriceps to hamstring strength and simply having smaller ACL’s, girls are “four to eight times more likely” to injure their ACL than boys, according to Galloway. A 2006 study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that 46,000 female athletes age 19 or younger had suffered an ACL injury and 30,000 of these required reconstructive surgery. In a survey of 321 East students, 12 percent reported to have experienced an ACL injury.

When Lowry had to call the schools recruiting him and tell them about his own ACL tear, his results weren’t the same as Lake’s. “[After the injury] I was thinking I would have to tell college coaches I was talking to about it,” Lowry says. “The one I really

sports | indepth

Isaac Cosculluela has his injured knee examined at Total Therapy Solutions in Monroe.

remember that I was talking to was William and Mary. I told them I was going to work hard in the offseason and get stronger and they said that was a good mindset. That was the last time I ever talked to them.”

Besides the College of William and Mary, Lowry had been receiving attention from several other Division I universities. Following his injury, his college mindset immediately had to change.

“I was thinking [after the injury] that it changes the college scene,” Stedman’s father David Lowry says. “He was probably going to be a Division I player before. Now we had to start looking at the high academic Division II’s, but there are just not that many.”

David, who has torn his right ACL twice, contacted several of these schools himself. One was Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts school in southern Michigan with an undergraduate enrollment of just over 1,400 students.

“After a while my dad started saying, ‘You need to start taking Division II as a serious possibility.’” Stedman says. “I had never even pictured myself at Division II. My dad reached out to [Hillsdale] and the first time they watched me play was this summer in Toledo. I visited there a few days later and they ended up offering me when I was up there.”

Stedman signed with Hillsdale on the Nov. 14 National Signing Day. Lake also signed her NLI to OU that day.

Despite missing their future OU Bobcat, the girls’ volleyball team still found success on the court. As they entered the playoffs, they touted a record of 19-2. After three wins in the state tournament, the Hawks were matched up in the southwest Ohio regional final against the eventual state champion Ursuline Academy, a team they had defeated earlier in the season.

They ended up falling in four games. This loss was especially tough for Lake as what would turn out to be her final high school volleyball game had come in the victory against the Lions. “[Throughout the season] I always felt like I was a part of the team,” Lake says. “I didn’t feel like I was on the bench. The whole season I wasn’t regretting not playing until the very end. [The Ursuline game] was tough because we played them early [in the season] and we had beaten them.”

Coming off his own defeat in a nail biting game against Winton Woods, East senior football player Isaac Cosculluela was just beginning to think about his own chances at a college scholarship when he was at practice on Sept. 11. At wide receiver, he was running a post—a route he had run hundreds of times in his life—when he cut one way and his left knee cut the other. He fell to the turf, but after

had surgery to repair his completely torn left ACL. When an ACL is completely torn it typically has to be replaced instead of simply being re-attached. There are two options for replacement: allografts and autografts.

Allografts are made of tissue sourced from an outside tissue bank and are usually used on non-athletes. Autografts come from the injured people themselves and are typically taken from either the patella or the hamstring, depending on the athlete’s situation, according to Galloway.

“Doctors tune [surgeries] to the sport of the athlete and what is going to least disrupt their performance,” says Galloway, who received his medical degree from Duke University. “If an athlete does a lot of jumping, you may want to think about doing a hamstring graft. Most of my football players tend to end up getting patella grafts because the fixations of those

I was like ‘I didn’t do anything. I can’t contribute to the team ever again.’

trainers performed tests on his knee he thought he had only sprained his ACL. So when his dad told him the results of his MRI a week later, the news stung even more.

“I was pissed. That same week we played Northmont,” Cosculluela says. “We kicked the game winning field goal at the last second, and I was like ‘I didn’t do anything. I can’t contribute to the team ever again.’”

Three weeks after his injury, Cosculluela

—East senior Isaac Cosculluela grafts tend to be stronger. [Allografts] are options for people who are older and have less physical demands.”

Cosculluela had an autograft from his patella and after his surgery he began his rehabilitation process at Total Therapy Solutions in Monroe.

There, he performed physical therapy exercises intended to strengthen his ACL and the rest of his knee.

“I do stuff like riding a stationary bike and

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 71

sports | indepth calf rises so I can get flexibility and strength back,” Cosculluela says. “The first time it was kind of tough and my knee hurt a lot but, it gets easier every time. I know it’s all going to help eventually.”

After Stedman had completed his own rehabilitation and returned to basketball in June, 20 weeks after his surgery, he had a little rust.

In his first game back on the first offensive possession after he had checked into the game, he took a pass in the corner outside of the three point arc. He put up a shot and air-balled it. On the next possession he took a pass and dribbled toward the basket, but lost the ball and it rolled out of bounds. Stedman says it took about two months for him to fully recover even after he had been cleared to play.

For one year after his surgery, Stedman is required to wear a knee brace, which he says has helped keep the injury itself—and the possibility of re-injury—from entering the back of his mind, even though surgically repaired knees are typically stronger than normal knees, according to Galloway. “[ACL tears] can make [athletes] less secure with the performance of their knee,” says Galloway, who received his medical degree from Duke University. “From a physiological standpoint it’s all about confidence. The statistics will show that there is a greater chance of tearing your ACL on your opposite knee than there is of tearing it on your reconstructed knee. That having been said, more recent

IN A SURVEY OF 321 EAST STUDENTS 12 PERCENT SAID THEY HAD SUFFERED AN ACL INJURY. studies have shown re-tear rates are anywhere from ten to 15 percent.”

Besides Stedman and David’s combined three right ACL tears, Stedman’s older sister has also torn her right ACL. Although it has yet to be proven, Galloway believes there are some genetic links that can cause ACL injuries to be common among family members.

“There are no genetic indicators that have being identified,” Galloway says. “That being said you look at families where multiple siblings and parents have had ACL tears and it’s like arthritis, it’s probably a multi-factorial inheritance pattern that you see.”

David has seen a drastic change in the rehabilitation process from his own injury to Stedman’s. The expected recovery time has dwindled from one year to only six months, which David says makes a “big difference.”

Galloway has seen improvements in several

72 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

different areas which have helped lead to this.

“Rehabilitation techniques, fixation for the grafts, understanding the forces that go through the ACL so they can be avoided during the rehabilitation process and better understanding of the science of graft healing have all improved dramatically in the past 30 years,” he says. “From a physical standpoint, most people are able to return to their preinjury levels of performance. Now most is not all; there’s probably 25 percent that aren’t.”

And even though his son missed the majority of his junior basketball season and a key part of the AAU season, David saw a positive side to the injury.

“I think the thing about it was he got a chance to be a kid for a few months,” David says. “He had been playing basketball 11 months out of the year since second grade. It wasn’t that big of a deal. He’s got a great place to play college basketball that’s a perfect fit.”

As Lake rehabs her own ACL at Cincinnati Sport Orthopedic to return to her own preinjury level of play, she is in discussions with the OU coaches about taking a redshirt her freshman year because of all the unknowns surrounding her return date. Despite this, Lake also considers her injury to be a blessing in disguise because of how much she used to take for granted and all the support she has received from friends, family and teammates. “[When I return] I will not be scared,” says Lake, a first team All-GMC selection her last year. “This whole experience is not just a physical experience, it’s more emotional.

Looking back I would see myself not putting 100 percent in everything. Knowing what I could have done shows me what I can do in the futures. I’m looking forward to be back. I didn’t realize how much it affects other people just because I’m out. It’s humbling.”

When Cosculluela is allowed to resume running, cutting and all athletic activities on Dec. 26, he claims he won’t be thinking about his injury—he knows he can’t.

“People say it will [affect me when I return] but I don’t think it will,” Cosculluela says. “It’s not going to be different. I’m not even going to think about it. You can’t think about it honestly.

I hate not doing anything. I’m just going to be thinking ‘I’m back to being Isaac.’”

Cosculluela, who has played East baseball for three years, says he plans on playing lacrosse this spring and walking-on to the football team of whatever college he attends in the fall— none of the schools that were showing interest in him before his injury have given him any scholarship offers now. But he understands.

Sometimes people slip. Sometimes people land on a teammate’s foot. Sometimes things happen.

“I wish I could play football all the time,” Cosculluela says. “It was like ‘Oh, they did all this without me, I can’t even do anything.’ But what can you do? ACL tears happen.” SM

A Closer Look

Anterior crutiate ligament (ACL) tears are painfull and difficult to repair. In most cases, surgery and physical therapy are required.

The injury

An ACL tear can result from either over extending the knee, implementing an abnormally large amount of pressure to the side of the joint, or quickly twisting the knee abnormally.

Over Extension pressure

Twisting

The surgery Many options exist for ACL replacement surgery. The most widely used are grafts, which use a sample of similar tissues transplanted into the knee to replace the ACL.

ACL

Grafts are typically one third of the patella tendon, the hamstring, or are taken from a donor.

The graft is screwed into the knee replacing the torn ACL. Physical therapy is required to regain full strength and flexibility

Information mayoclinic.com, sportsci.org, physician marc galloway

8

sports | 8 things

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT Cutting Weight For Wrestling

story daniel roth east varsity wrestling (as told to ivana giang) photo nick kanaly

Eating Healthy

“If you cut out junk food like chips, soda and candy, you can easily drop two to three pounds because youre getting rid of fats and sugars.”

Sleep

“When you’re cutting weight, it’s harder to fall asleep and takes longer because you feel deprived.

I take Neurosleep which helps me fall asleep within 10 to 15 minutes.”

Water

“The great thing about water is that you can drink as much of it as you want up until a couple days before weigh-in. By drinking water, you also cut out other drinks that are unhealthy.

Attitude

“When cutting weight, you go through more mood swings. When you’re not eating you get angry at small things, but its really important to push through it.”

Energy

“When you out food you do not have as much energy. I drink green tea to help gain energy.”

Mental Strength

“It’s difficult to resist the temptation of food. Also at school, you need to focus to keep grades up in order to stay eligible.”

Physical Strength

“You are not going to have as much energy when you cut weight, but you have to push through it and work to do everything correctly like you would in a match.”

Time

“It takes extra time. If you want to cut weight, you have to stay after practice to run or lift extra weights.”

BY THE

NUMBERS

72

Points the East boys’ basketball team scored in their first game of the season.

31 1 7 1203 3 Wins East senior wrestler Austin Daly had last year.

Following the

Hawks Sophomore Kandance Satterwhite heads to the basket during the Lady Hawks’ game against Carroll. East lost 44-40.

Sophomore Alex White backs down a defender in the boys’ basketball’s 69-59 victory against Western Hills.

Seniors on the East girls’ basketball team.

Yards rushed by East senior running back Will Mahone, the fourth East player to ever rush for over 1,000 yards in a season.

Number of All-Americans in East history, with East senior volleyball player Ashley Evans becoming the most recent.

GMC TICKER: 74 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

photo nick kanaly

Preseaon city ranking for the East boys’ basketball team in the Cincinnati Enquirer poll.

Scan this QR Code with a smartphone to access sports stories and game coverage throughout the winter season on our website: www.lakotaeastspark.com.

photo nick kanaly

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photo michael tedesco

sports | hawk culture

Senior Ashley Evans was chosen as a 2nd team AllAmerican, the first volleyball player to receive the accolade in school history.

Sophomore Alex White 3rd in GMC in rebounding

sports | hawk culture

Q&A WITH

Sandee Coats-Haan Academic Quiz Team Coach

Coats-Haan reads questions to team members during an AQT practice.

interview sam hauck | photo michael tedesco SAM HAUCK: When did you

SAM HAUCK: What does a

sandee coats-haan:

SANDEE

previously coach the academic quiz team?

typical quiz team practice look like?

I coached during the 2000-2001 school year.

We just go through old sets of questions twice a week for about an hour to an hour and a half. We split up and play each other. Maybe I’ll read questions or maybe [East junior] Katie Masterson will.

SAM HAUCK: After taking a break from coaching, why did you decide to come back?

SANDEE

COATS-HAAN:

SAM HAUCK: How are you planning to replace the seniors that you lost last year to graduation?

SAM HAUCK: What equipment do you use for practices?

SANDEE COATS-HAAN:

SANDEE COATS-HAAN:

Unfortunately all of the question sets we had were lost in transition.

The buzzers didn’t work either, and I had to send them out to be fixed. We just got our buzzers back and we are lucky enough that West copied their question sets for us.

We are a very young team this year. We are definitely in a rebuilding phase. We have [East senior] Zach Fulciniti for the first time and he’s going to be our superstar. SM

COATS-HAAN:

I enjoy it a lot. I had to quit because Jacob, my son, was in preschool and I just couldn’t do it with time. I just couldn’t keep up with the practices and matches so that’s why I quit. I was just kind of waiting for a time where the opportunity came up again, and it did so I approached Mr. Bryant and here I am.

Academic Quiz Team Round Classification 3. Lightning Round

2. Alphabet Round

1. Category Round

-20 two-point questions.

-Teams buzz in to answer.

-After this round, scores from all three sections are added up to determine winner.

-20 one-point questions.

-Answers begin with designated letter of alphabet -Teams have five minutes to write answers.

-Begins with a cointoss.

-10 seconds to answer each question.

-30 three-point questions.

HAWK CULTURE A look into the lives of East athletes and coaches infographic sam hauck

Morgan McHugh SWIMMING

Austin Emrick BOYS’ BASKETBALL

Kandance Satterwhite

Girls’ basketball

Austin Daly WRESTLING

Jaime Etterling GYMNASTICS

Clint Adkins BOYS’ BASKETBALL

Who will win the Super Bowl?

NOT THE BENGALS

BENGALS

THE BEST TEAM

FALCONS

baltimore

TEXANS

Best part of winter?

CHRISTMAS

BASKETBALL

SNOW DAYS

HOT CHOCOLATE

CHRISTMAS

BASKETBALL

Best holiday movie?

CHRISTMAS VACATION

CHRISTMAS VACATION

ELF

CHRISTMAS VACATION

POLAR EXPRESS

CHRISTMAS VACATION

If you could live anywhere where would it be?

NEW YORK

DJIBOUTI

SOUTH CAROLINA

HAWAII

HAWAII

WEST CHESTER

Who would play you in a movie?

BETTY WHITE

CHANNING TATUM

BETTY WHITE

FREDDY FROM icARLY

REESE WITHERSPOON

mark wahlberg

Nick Gasser, first first in GMC GMCSatterwhite in touchbacks touchbacks Nick Gasser, in in in GMC in 5K time Sophomore Kandace 4th inKelly GMCBurrows, in blocksseventh per game

wobat ports complex 9230 Port Union Rialto Rd. West Chester, Ohio 45069

High school

dodgeball tournament when: Jan. 12, 2013 @ 8 PM $10 per player, eight

Cost: players per team Forms available at:

Deadline:

www.swobat.com

Jan. 5, 2013

Give forms to Taylor Hillman or Alexis Ostrander

Spark 2012-13

Every month, Spark holds a fundraiser night at a local restaurant.

Spark would like to sincerely thank Smashburger, Red Robin, and City Barbecue for hosting these nights during the first months of the school year. We look forward to working with these as well as other businesses in the future.

opinion | column

ten-second blast

watching out ALEXA CHRYSSOVERGIS

PACkage EDITOR alexa.chryssovergis@lakotaeastspark.com I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed on my phone, procrastinating on homework when I saw it. It was a picture of the inside of a classroom at East, taken by an amused student in secret. There were maybe seven or so desks piled up against the closed door and the caption of the picture read “I love my school.”

It occurred to me that the kid who had posted the picture probably only declared his love for East because he thought that the drill was funny, or maybe because of the fact that it took away 10 minutes of time that he may otherwise have to spend learning. But he had another, valid reason to be grateful to attend one school in almost 300 school systems nationwide, according to a story written by National Public Radio (NPR),

they would not lie down and beg for mercy. that practices drills in which students pile desks up to barricade the doors.

That student should love East because taking the time for just an hour-long session and two 10-minute Alert-LockdownInform-Counter-Evacuate (A.L.i.C.E) practice drills could save his life someday.

Granted, the chances of dying in a school shooting are “at least one in a million,” according to stateimpact.org, a reporting project of NPR. Mr. Bryant and the rest of the East teaching staff, however, are taking precautions just in case that one student of a million that finally cracks decides to make his victims the inhabitants of East.

As Mr. Bryant went into the details of A.L.i.C.E. during the required hour long seminar, he warned all of the six full theaters that they should be slightly wary of the two drills that would occur on Friday, because they were going to be much more intense than the ones from previous years.

Naturally, as Friday approached, students

began to express their apprehension towards the drills via Twitter. It wasn’t just Twitter. Teachers took time out of class to hold short informative sessions even before Friday. And the effect was miraculous. The student population at East hadn’t had a more responsive and dramatic reaction on the web since the yoga pants controversy during the 2011-2012 school year.

This time around, the drill wasn’t viewed as a joke as it had been in previous years. Rather than simply coming over the intercom and half-heartedly announcing the hypothetical situation of a shooter in the building, members of East’s administrative staff ran around school rattling door knobs, making sure rooms were barricaded, and engaging everyone in active practice.

The idea of being in a school shooting is terrifying and surely, as Mr. Bryant warned his students, even the roughest, toughest, 250 lb linebacker would freeze up if they were placed in such a petrifying situation. But as teachers walked their students through the counterattack plan in case such a rare situation every occurred, an air of rebellion spread through the school. Of course, it was not that the students of East wanted their school to be attacked by a psychopath with a gun, but rather that if such a rarity ever did occur, they would not lie down and beg for mercy, as practiced previously to the institution of A.L.i.C.E. training at Lakota Local Schools four years ago.

They would use the sledgehammer under Mrs. Hendrick’s desk to bash through the windows to escape; or the rope in Mrs. Coats-Haan’s room to scale the walls outside her windows; or the bat and the sword of Gryffindor on Mr. Hume’s wall to attack anyone who dares threaten their safety.

These seem to be much better options than sitting compliantly. Not taking initiative or begging for mercy, as seen at Columbine or Virginia Tech, proves an unsuccessful plan that merits heartbreaking results.

The hope is that a few desks, heavy textbooks, swords and sledgehammers will be enough to prepare us for the rampage of the next Jared Lee Loughner.

So, don’t mess with us. SM

from the Editorial Board Each issue, the editorial board of Spark assigns grades to three topics in the school or community that have touched East in the previous month.

A.L.i.C.E. Training The intent behind A.L.i.C.E training deserves an A+ because the administration is thinking how to protect the students and faculty.

The 45-minute assembly, however, caused class time to be lost. As a result, tests were moved around and now classes must make up for the lost time. Overall, ALiCE training is a much better plan than before, but the execution should be more efficient.

b-

School cameras The school cameras are out-of-date and obsolete.

This was proven after the tire-slashing incident that ended with several cars being vandalized.

While the editorial board understands that this is of no fault of the administration, it is unfortunate for the students and staff who use the parking lot that the current funding situation cannot afford a better surveillance system.

D

New exam schedule Although it was with good intentions, the first quarter exams put more pressure on students to focus on studying for asssessments, while studying new information from other classes. Teachers also found that the schedule did not provide sufficient time for testing. The editorial board has given the new schedule an A because it allows students to focus solely on studying.

a

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opinion | head to head

more gun After the numerous school shootings in the last decade,

T

RAIKA CASEY

raika.casey@lakotaeastspark.com

78 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

hirteen dead. 21 wounded. Columbine. 1999. largest drops in violent crimes.

Thirty-two dead. 15 wounded. Virginia For example, in counties with Tech. 2007. populations of more than Families ruined, lives drastically changed by 200,000 people, concealed people who shouldn’t have been allowed to pull a handgun laws produced an trigger. average drop in murder rates Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the assailants in of more than 13 percent. The counties with the the Columbine shooting were disturbed. highest rape rates saw that crime drop by more than Their anger against the world was no secret. seven percent.

Harris made a website on which he broadcasted his Guns were banned on both the Columbine and general dissatisfaction with society and his desire to Virginia Tech campuses, making the shooters the kill those who annoyed him, and Klebold passed only ones with access to firearms. In many cases, it along. Harris mentioned a gun count and made one gun in the hands of someone besides the a hit list of individuals he wished to target. Harris shooter could have saved dozens of lives. also stated on his website that he was in possession This leads into one of the biggest misconceptions of explosives. Investigator Michael Guerra wrote a about gun laws. draft affidavit, requesting a search warrant of the Laws that prevent ordinary citizens from Harris household, but it was never filed. exercising their Second Amendment rights do not Seung-Hui Cho, the assailant in the Virginia Tech work as their supporters assume they do. John mass murder, was mentally unsound. Diagnosed Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, “hates guns” with anxiety issues. Hated the world. according to TIME. After 11 and a half years in The signs were all there for a forthcoming power, he called for implementing the strictest gun school shooting. laws in the world in Australia. His intentions were as It always seems to be the case that the good as anyone’s: to lessen gun violence. However, perpetrator was mentally unstable, and that their statistics show that gun violence was decreasing cries of intention were brushed aside. It may appear at a constant rate prior to the implementation of that these instances could have been prevented with the laws, and while the numbers did continue to harsher gun laws, but that’s not the right solution. decline, it was at the same rate, thus showing that The problem is the lack of proper care of those laws had little to no effect. The evidence collected who suffer from mental illnesses such as anxiety, concludes that the goal of reducing gun deaths by schitzophrenia and depression. With proper disarming citizens is not achieved. treatment, they could have been stopped.

Also according to Lott, “guns are the great Requirement for background checks regarding equalizer between the weak and the vicious.” A mental illnesses should be mandatory in order to normal citizen hoisting a 9 mm pistol next to a lawpurchase a firearm, for the purpose of preventing breaking citizen with a 9 mm pistol equalize them future instances. University of Chicago law in power, no matter their stark lifestyle differences. professor John R. Lott, Jr. conducted a study for It brings the normal citizen up to par with the the years 1977 through 1992 during which 31 states gunman, ultimately taking away the only advantage gave their citizens the right to carry concealed the law-breaking citizen has. They both have the handguns. The study only granted this to citizens ability to kill with a cock and pull of the trigger. who did not have a criminal record or a history of Ordinary citizens should not be permitted to significant mental illness. As a result, his estimates have a Bazooka or an AK-47 on their person or showed that by adopting these laws, states reduced sitting proudly on their mantle, but there is no murders by eight and a half percent, rapes by five evidence that supports the argument that inhibiting percent, aggravated assaults by seven percent and upstanding citizens’ ability to own their own pistol robbery by three percent. This implies that criminals ameliorates the issue of death by guns. do take into account the threat So it’s possible that those The problem of deterrence from the victim 45 lives and many more from when going about illicit means. mass shootings would’ve been is the lack Also according to his spared if one citizen had a of proper study, while support for strict firearm to counter gunmans’ gun-control laws usually bas care of those threats. Because when guns been strongest in large cities, are outlawed, only the outlaws who suffer where crime rates are highest, have guns. from mental that’s precisely where right-toAnd that’s just the way they carry laws have produced the like it. SM illnesses.

opinion | head to head

control?

should states be considering stricter gun control laws?

T

hree years ago, I went to Chicago with my walk into a local store and purchase a 9 mm pistol father to go get my passport renewed. as he did, as reported by CNN. Nor should he have Afterwards, we decided to take a horse- been able to buy ammunition in Walmart. He had a drawn carriage ride around the city at night. history of mental instability. But because Arizona’s I found myself sitting in a white carriage with gun control laws were very lax and his background an overenthusiastic coachwoman eager to mask all check did not perceive odd behavior, Loughner of Chicago’s woes and a horse that nonchalantly got his Glock 19 gun and started shooting at the released its mess onto the stained concrete road. local Safeway in Tuscon, AZ where Representative It was glory bathed in a smell of excrement and a Gabrielle Giffords was speaking. sharp hint of chill.

By killing six innocent bystanders and wounding We continued our ride for a while, admiring 13 more people, including Giffords, Loughner Chicago’s slightly dimmed skyline and staring back unleashed a madness that history does not want at a couple of pedestrians envying us for sitting in repeated. And, over a year and half later, he is such a silly thing. But, suddenly, there was a sharp finally getting the sentence from our nation’s sloth“boom.” A gunshot. The horse stopped and shook like judicial system: seven sentences of life and 140 for a bit and the coachwoman tried to soothe it. years in prison according to USA TODAY. Moments later, an ambulance siren pierced the No one should be the victim of such a harrowing air and whizzed past. Upon hearing it, I realized that ordeal. But the U.S. is a country that gives people someone had been shot and that the ambulance was freedoms that are continually abused, and American rushing to his or her aid. And the experience stuck citizens know it. We as a nation have to understand with me just like a curious fly sticks to horse dung. that the best way to go about fixing this problem But if gun control laws were stricter, I wouldn’t is to have more stringent laws regarding firearm have been scarred by this experience. purchase and use.

Of all the aspects of Obama’s presidency from Gun laws are not standard across states.

2009-2012, the one thing he failed to address or Citizens are guaranteed the right to bear arms in remotely take action on was gun control. the Second Amendment, but other than that, the During Obama’s first term, 11 shootings nation’s 50 states each pass their own legislation involving three or more deaths happened in the regarding firearm handling and purchase. While United States, from the 2011 Tuscon, AZ shooting people don’t need permits or licenses to openly to the more recent shootings in Aurora, Colorado. carry their firearms in Arizona (one of the most While occurrences of other major issues in the relaxed states when it comes to gun laws, and had United States such as teen pregnancy and drinking an 18 percent increase in gun crime in 2010), no and driving have shrunk, gun-related homicides one can openly carry such a weapon in California have stayed at the same rate, due in part to the (a state having an eight percent decrease in gun steady rate of gun ownership. Some Americans violence in the same year). When it comes to public continue to exercise and often exploit their right purchase, as mandated by the Brady Handgun to bear arms by buying these lethal weapons. In Violence Prevention Act, a passed background fact, gun sales are expected to rise due to Obama’s check is necessary, but only from a criminal and a reelection according to the New York Daily News. broad psychological point of view. Many private The United States has the highest gun ownership purchases forego this simple, yet necessary practice, rate in the world: on average 88 guns for every 100 leading to guns to be placed in the wrong hands. people, according to The Guardian. Runner-up is Many Americans expound on the fact that Yemen, at 54.8. As of July 2012, the United States they need guns for self-defense, yet our country is has the highest average total of all civilian firearms, suffering more crime due to the availability of guns.

270 million, well ahead of India’s 46 million.

America has to standardize gun laws and ban all sale Not only is the United States a nation that takes of assault weapons. Gun buyers should produce full advantage of our claimed medical records with at least And the “right to self-defense,” but 5 years of review, including also one that tends to put guns any psychiatric review as well experience into the wrong hands. as a criminal background stuck with Clinically diagnosed check. For the sake of the schizophrenic and college defenseless, the United States me just like a dropout Jared Lee Loughner, has to take these measures.

CURIOUS fly for instance, should never have Or experiences like mine in sticks to had a chance to touch a gun.

Chicago will be embeddeded He shouldn’t have been able to into many people’s minds. SM horse dung.

EMILY CHAO

emily.chao@lakotaeastspark.com

www.lakotaeastspark.com | Spark | 79

opinion | column

cutting the pain MORGAN BAIN

PACKAGE editor morgan.bain@lakotaeastspark.com

H

e said that he hadn’t been happy lately, and had to find a way to “deal with things.”

I hesitantly pushed the thick black sleeve up past his forearm and rotated his arm toward me. Several small grayish lines covered his wrist. Surprisingly, he didn’t pull away from my grasp.

The scars were faint, but they were there.

Everything seemed to move slowly for a moment; every second seemed magnified.

Words came crawling up my throat, but they caught me off guard. This was the first time I had been able to see my best friend in months, and I couldn’t even bring myself to speak to him. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to scream or cry or just not say anything at all.

“Don’t,” was all I managed to choke, “ever again.”

I let go of his arm, and he shook his sleeve down over his wrist again, almost as if he wanted to pretend I hadn’t seen the marks.

I looked up at him, but his eyes were fixed on the ground. I grabbed his shoulders, which I had to stand on my tip-toes to do.

“Promise me.”

He looked into my eyes, and I couldn’t exactly tell why, but his eyes weren’t the same.

Their deep blue color gave me the feeling of familiarity, but they were different.

“I promise,” he mumbled, turning away from me again. “I won’t.”

And I believed him. I thought that he wouldn’t do it again and that forcing him to make a promise to me would solve the problem. I figured he would have listened to his best friend of all people.

It’s not like I hadn’t helped him with his problems before. Having known him since the sixth grade, I was always able to provide some sort of advice, whether he was trying to deal with homework, family issues or girlfriend troubles.This shouldn’t have to be any different.

And it’s kind of funny how, up until a point, I always believed it would.

I

t was October. The cold wind was desperately trying to push through the windows to invade my warm living room, rattling the screens incessantly. I looked up

80 | Spark | Dec. 17, 2012

from my homework and figured I’d see the trees swaying outside, but I was surprised to see nothing but black. I had forgotten how dark it gets this time of year.

Ugh, I have soooo much homework. Seriously, this is awful. I hate school.

I tossed my phone onto the other couch after typing that text, hoping to actually focus on my homework. A few minutes later, my phone vibrated and I couldn’t resist the urge. Refusing to even move from my comfy spot, I smiled mockingly to myself as I uncomfortably reached for my phone.

Hold on Morgan, I’ll be back. I’ll talk to you when I’m more…stable.

As much as I wanted to be confused by his text, I wasn’t. It brought me back to that time about two months earlier. I knew that

And even though it sounds bad, at that point I didn’t really care if he had cut himself. he hasn’t listened to me and was cutting.

Wait, what do you mean?

I was simply gauging for a reaction. I hoped for the answer I wasn’t expecting, but I figured I shouldn’t fool myself. I squeezed my eyes shut and clutched the blanket in my hands, pressing the fabric into my palms until I felt my nails dig into my skin.

I don’t know how long I waited, but it seemed like too long. My mind started running through all of the things that could be happening. I knew there was a chance that he could become like one of the 102,305 people that were admitted into the hospital in 2011 because of cutting. I squeezed my eyes and hands tighter and tighter to clear my head. And to keep myself from crying.

Please don’t do anything dangerous that you

know you’re going to regret. Just talk to me about whatever’s bothering you, please. I can help. Please just answer me.

All I wanted was an answer. And even though it sounds bad, at that point I didn’t really care if he had cut himself. I just wanted him to respond and to know that he was okay, that he hadn’t done anything worse.

You don’t f---ing understand.

My hands felt numb while replying to that message. I frantically began to type, pleading him to just tell me what was wrong, and that of course, I’d understand.

You don’t understand. You’d never be able to, as much as you want to, you can’t. It’s not something I can explain. There’s nothing you can do.

Kicking the blanket off of my legs, I stood up to leave the room so that my mom couldn’t see me crying and to avoid the flood of questions she would have asked. As I paced around my room, I tried to make sense of everything.

This was the first time he’d rejected my help, not because he didn’t want it, but because I just couldn’t do anything. But knowing this didn’t help me to accept it. My inner turmoil was swallowing me from the inside out. Focusing on homework clearly wasn’t going to happen. I just wanted to understand why I couldn’t help, why he was hurting himself and if anything would make him stop.

There wasn’t anything I could reply to his text with. I didn’t even know what to say to comfort him, or if I would even be able to.

I thought about telling his parents so that they could do something for him, get him help or something, but he has a horrible relationship with them. He would hate me if I did that.

I thought about telling his friends, but they probably already knew and had tried to stop him just like I wanted to, which clearly hadn’t worked.

I thought about telling one of his teachers or a counselor, but then the word might get around and it would be all my fault.

I thought about doing anything, everything to help him.

But I just sat there, because there was nothing I could do. SM

opinion | east speaks out editorial cartoon alice li

LAKOTA EAST

SPEAKS OUT

should east security cameras be updated in light of the recent tire slashings?

Last year didn’t they have a story in the Spark about the security system [inside] and how some of it didn’t work?

I definitely think it needs improvement. They could have stopped him quickly if they had a better security system.

-East senior Colton Wilson

I don’t think it’s worth the money. It’s not that often that this happens and the district doesn’t have the money to do so.

-East senior Charlie Tamayo

12

percent of students out of 321 surveyed have had an ACL tear or injury.

Editor’s Note: Spark covered the indoor security system and its blind spots in modern parenting during the 2010-11 school year.

29

I honestly don’t think security cameras could have pinpointed exactly who it was, so I feel like the administration handled it the best it could.

percent of girls out of 172 surveyed that own and wear Ugg boots

I heard that the office said that [the security camera system] only comes on every other day, so it never totally covers everything. They need to amp [security] up.

31

-East junior Mariah Combs

-East sophomore Pierce Caldwell

number of students out of 327 that play video games ten or more hours a week

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opinion | the final word

the final word

Jeff Back Editor-in-Chief

P

People often tell me I’m weird for bowling with only two fingers. I never understood that.

My hands never seemed like much. Most times, I just complained that I couldn’t palm a basketball. Other times, that I would never be a successful guitarist—but my small hands might not be the only thing to blame for that.

Never had I quite considered that maybe I was lucky for having them. That counting to twenty on my fingers and toes was a blessing in and of itself. But last spring, I walked out of Mason Bowl appreciating those fingers for the very first time. It was odd. I had never given it much thought.

Brian Wenstrup has that effect on people.

That afternoon at Special Olympics bowling practice, I was asked to bowl with Brian and—a very different assignment from my normal duties telling young children when it was and wasn’t their turn to bowl. It definitely sounded like a lot more fun.

When I approached the lane to take my first turn, though, I noticed a bowling ball unlike any other I had ever seen. It was brick red all around, except for a white line on the top, and there was a quarter-sized chunk missing next to the line.

More curiously, there weren’t any holes.

But I took my turn—a spare—and sat down, still wondering about the red ball. How did you use it? What was it for? And when Brian approached the lane, he quickly answered all of my questions.

He swiftly picked it up—by the handle—and threw his first ball.

An eight. Again. By the handle. One more pin. So when he came to sit down, I asked him about the ball.

All Brian had to do was raise his right hand.

Before me was his underdeveloped hand—complete with a thumb and the base of four fingers. Brian grinned, and told me he was born like that. The ball had a retractable handle, so people with hand problems like him could still bowl. And in Brian’s case, bowl well.

With a 127 under his belt after the first game, Brian let out a smile that I can only describe as priceless. But for me, the perspective Brian offered was even more invaluable.

Despite his bowling success, there will be many things that Brian Wenstrup will never do because of his hand. He will never be a master juggler. And he will never be an All-Star pitcher. There is nothing I can do to change that. But after spending several afternoons bowling with Brian, I’m not sure he’d change it if given the chance.

While his underdeveloped hand is a hindrance that can make daily activities troublesome, Brian has never, in our short relationship, let it define him or be an excuse.

And why should he? He’s happy. He’s got a wonderful girlfriend. And he’s one heck of a bowler.

But while Brian may have made amends with his handicap, he still faces challenges that no one should be made to face. For anyone, that’s a tough thing to watch.

And then Brian takes another turn—a strike—and gives me a little bit of smack talk. And I think I’ve got it. There’s nothing I can do to help Brian, but in reality, he doesn’t need any. All I can do is appreciate that which I have been given, and do whatever I can to make Brian happy. Well, anything but let him beat me bowling. I’d still like to think I have the upper hand in that.

I think it’s in my form; two fingers is by far the way to go. And although I still choose to bowl that way, I have to thank Brian for reminding me that not everyone has that choice. SM

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